“As the largest NBC affiliate group among independent station groups, we are proud of our longstanding partnership that enables us to serve local communities,” said Dave Lougee, president-CEO, Tegna. “This new multi-year agreement allows our stations to continue providing consumers and advertisers with premium network content such as Today, Sunday Night Football and this summer’s Paris Olympic Games alongside our award-winning local news, weather and sports.”

“Tegna continues to be an important partner to NBC, bringing our loved, must-see programming to top markets across the United States,” said Philip Martzolf, president, NBC Affiliate Relations. “This renewal comes at the perfect time as NBC returns to primetime with midseason programming this week, as well as prepares for two of TV’s biggest moments in the election and Summer Olympics later this year.”

The new agreement includes full carriage of the NBC broadcast network, including NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt, Sunday Night Football, the Summer and Winter Olympic Games, The Voice, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and more.

The agreement includes renewals for these Tegna-owned NBC affiliates: WXIA Atlanta, Ga.; KPNX-KNAZ Phoenix, Ariz.; KING Seattle, Wash.; KARE Minneapolis, Minn.; KUSA Denver, Colo.; WKYC Cleveland, Ohio; KGW Portland, Ore.; WCNC Charlotte, N.C.; KSDK St. Louis, Mo.; WTHR Indianapolis, Ind.; WTLV Jacksonville, Fla.; WGRZ Buffalo, N.Y.; WBIR Knoxville, Tenn.; WCSH Portland, Maine; KCEN-KAGS Waco, Texas; KTVB Boise, Idaho, along with KTFT Twin Falls, Idaho; KWES Odessa-Midland, Texas; KBMT Beaumont, Texas; and WLBZ Bangor, Maine.

The post Tegna And NBC Renew Affiliation Agreement appeared first on TV News Check.

“My job is to be the champion of our news directors, our news leaders across the country, and the stress that they are under is different than I’ve ever seen before,” said Ellen Crooke, Tegna’s SVP of news. “So many of the day-to-day conversations that I have with news leaders are about dealing with the stress of the journalists due to the type of stories they face.”

Frequent mass shootings and other dangers have forced TV-station newsrooms to carefully consider every decision to send a news team out to cover an event and even to reduce exposure by choosing not to report from the field when it’s not deemed necessary.

“That’s one of the things I think that’s changed the most,” Crooke said. “When I started, news leaders were in charge of safety and security. It’s too much now.”

Newsrooms today are employing security consultants and teams and holding careful conversations to determine the best course of action before sending teams out in a knee-jerk reaction to breaking news.

“Good leaders will evaluate every story, every assignment, every situation to ensure that when we need more than what we have, we’re providing that,” said Barb Maushard, SVP of news, Hearst Television.

And those conversations aren’t only around news teams, but around all teams going out to cover any event, including the weather.

“A few years ago, we hired a head of security, but we also mandate that security teams go with every single crew that’s out in the field,” said Nora Zimmett, president, news and original series, Allen Media’s The Weather Group.

Weather is another area that’s changed dramatically in recent years, as reporters and producers increasingly face dramatic weather situations.

“I was raised in the business when it was like ‘suck it up,’ but we don’t do that anymore,” Zimmett said. “There is no mandate to go out and cover anything. We have people who are like ‘OK, I’ll do snow and hurricanes, but I no longer do tornadoes,’ or ‘I’ll do tornadoes and snow. I don’t do hurricanes,’ and that’s OK. Because there is nothing worth that level of stress, that level of PTSD.

“It was a shift for myself, my direct reports and our executive leadership team that just because we were taught that you just deal with it, that doesn’t mean it’s right,” she added. “And that also certainly doesn’t mean you’re going to get the best out of your employees. If you have a reputation in your shop for throwing caution to the wind, you’re not going to retain the best talent. That is not a way to lead your team. I think the news industry has to evolve out of this sort of militaristic attitude of ‘it’s our way or the highway.’”

Newsroom leaders also have had to take steps to support employees’ mental health, which can become fragile while performing difficult jobs in stressful situations.

“Back in the day, it was ‘go do this and write this and send it in,’” said Sam Singal, group VP, Charter Communications’ Spectrum News. “Now I find that we spend a lot of time walking through the newsrooms, pulling up a chair and talking to people and understanding what they’re going through.”

Companies also have made mental health services available to employees.

“We’ve made sure that our employees have places to go to seek support for those who want to stay in and want to be able to manage the challenges of the job,” Maushard said.

Of course, part and parcel of these conversations is the issue of pay — journalism has always been a notably low-paying field except for perhaps the biggest names. But companies have recently been forced to increase salaries as it’s become harder to retain employees.

“We are actively and constantly looking at equity and analyzing what are our competitors paying what our colleagues paying just to make sure that we’re up to par with everybody else,” Singal said.

“We have to pay the right amount of money for the jobs, whatever that amount is supposed to be,” Maushard said. “But I think it’s more than that. It’s about the benefits. It’s about the environments we create. It’s about the purpose. It’s about people wanting to do this and then us having to make these into the kind of environments where they’re going to want to be because our communities depend on it. Democracy depends on it.”

Adding to the stress is the cadence of the 24-hour news cycle — including at TV stations where streaming apps and FAST channels have increased the content burden — as well as the pressure to stay connected with audiences through social media. Technology that automates some of those tasks can help, said Joe DiGiovanni, head of North American sales at The Weather Company.

For example, if a station group like Tegna, which owns 64 stations in 51 markets, is covering one weather crisis in one market and a completely different one in another, technology can help stations communicate with and assist one other.

“There may be somebody out West who is an expert in wildfires, while there may be somebody down South who’s an expert in hurricanes. That’s still a news story in other markets, but they may not have that content. So, through our cloud technologies, they can grab that content from those markets and use it in other places,” DiGiovanni said.

In addition, storing content on the cloud in searchable databases means it’s easy to find in crisis situations.

The Weather Company also provides weather forecasting technology that helps meteorologists tell weather stories to viewers in a way that’s comprehensive but also easy to understand. That type of technology has become increasingly essential as climate change has become a central focus of newsrooms’ ongoing coverage.

“Our job at the Weather Channel is to predict the future, and this uncertain future is scary,” Zimmett said. “We view our job now as not just to predict what’s going to happen in terms of extreme weather, but what’s going to happen to your mortgage, what’s going to happen to your insurance? That is something that is now a fabric of our coverage.”

“It’s not about climate change from where we sit. It’s about climate and weather impact,” Maushard said.

When covering anything from climate change to financial markets, political campaigns or even local traffic, technology remains both a useful tool and a potential threat, especially as newsrooms experiment more and more with artificial intelligence (AI).

“We look at AI in three different ways,” Crooke said. “The first is ethics: How will we as journalists use AI appropriately and transparently? Second: how can we innovate using AI? And third, which is what worries me most: How will we be duped by AI, especially in the 2024 presidential election?”

To avoid the third scenario, Tegna is training all of its journalists in the first quarter of 2024 on how to detect and deflect disinformation propagated with the use of AI.

Because journalism is more stressful and challenging than ever, it’s even more driven by the passion and purpose of those who pursue it, panelists said. That’s the secret sauce that keeps people in the business.

“News really is a calling. You have to have a passion and want to do it because you’re gonna make sacrifices,” Maushard said.

“One of the things that makes people stay in their jobs is feeling that they are part of a purpose, that they are doing work that matters,” Crooke said. “I think we’ve seen so much loss in journalism because there’s not always strong work happening that’s making a difference in our communities. The more we focus on purpose, the better our retention will be.”

Read more coverage of NewsTECHForum 2023 here.

Watch this session and all the NewsTECHForum 2023 videos here.

The post News Leaders Focus On Journalist Protection, Stress In Fraught ’24 appeared first on TV News Check.

Broadcasters are continuing to adopt cloud technology and IP networking while maintaining a strong defense against cybersecurity threats. And they are also exploring the potential benefits — and hazards — of artificial intelligence (AI) to their operations.

Those were some of the key takeaways from Technology Leaders on Trends in 2024, a TVNewsCheck webinar moderated by this reporter that gathered top broadcasters and vendors to examine the current state of media workflows and forecast key technology trends for the new year and beyond. “Hybrid” was a theme that came up repeatedly, both in the context of business models and broadcasters’ technology architectures. (To watch the video of the full webinar, click here.)

Tackling Hybridity

Paul Cheesbrough, CEO of Tubi Media Group for Fox Corp., noted the “key milestone” when Nielsen Gauge data in July 2023 showed broadcast and cable TV linear viewing fell below 50% of overall TV consumption for the first time as streaming viewing continued to grow (to 38.7% over the same month).

“That key tipping point is pretty material, and it kind of summarizes nicely where we are as a business, which in terms of consumer distribution of our content is very hybrid with the traditional platforms but also the new emerging platforms like streaming,” Cheesbrough said. “As a technology organization, supporting that hybrid of platforms where the consumer exists is really central to how we’ve invested and how we structure ourselves. Now, the big focus on ’24 is obviously to keep those platforms running, but really lean in to making sure streaming is a good long-term business for us, that it monetizes well, and that the economics of it really start to pull through.”

Fox has already created a cloud-first technology infrastructure based around its Tempe, Ariz., content hub to support this hybrid distribution model of linear TV and streaming, and there are other broadcasters like Sinclair that are also aggressively shifting their workflows to the public cloud. But Bryan Bedford, head of IoT and verticals for Cisco Systems, said that most customers are looking to implement hybrid technology infrastructures that combine cloud compute with a healthy dose of private cloud or on-premise hardware. That is largely due to the cost of running broadcast workflows on public cloud platforms.

“Now people are coming to us and asking, how can we look at a hybrid environment?” Bedford said. “Not to discredit that [the cloud], there are a lot of great uses cases for public cloud, it’s awesome. But they’re looking at cost innovation and what can we do in our own data center, to maybe alleviate some of that opex sourcing.”

Bedford added that investment in 2110 IP routing infrastructures continues to grow. He said the industry has moved out of the “bleeding-edge adoption phase” as workflows have solidified and integration expertise has grown, and that Cisco has seen a “steady increase across all major areas” for 2110 including studios, production control rooms, master control rooms, stadiums and mobile production units. The company now has several hundred live 2110 deployments around the world.

“We don’t see it slowing down for some time,” Bedford said.

Lawo is also seeing interest in hybrid architectures, said Jeremy Courtney, senior director in the company’s CTO office. He estimated that most Lawo customers are still using on-premise hardware for 70%-80% of their technical infrastructures.

“There are some customers that have absolutely embraced the cloud and have gone all in, but we’re seeing more who favor the hybrid approach,” Courtney said. “If you are going to use the cloud 24/7, there are some costs that come with that. And I think it’s not unreasonable to say if you are using functionality on a 24/7 basis there’s no advantage to having that all in the cloud, by egress costs, ingress costs, etc. Then to be honest, run it on premise.”

Courtney said many broadcasters used to equate “agility” with working in the cloud, but that the industry has learned that is not necessarily true. While public cloud can help at peak times, he said, “you can absolutely have a level of agility in your data center on premise.”

As it looks to help its customers support live production, Lawo is busy developing a three-layered “dynamic media facility” with IP as the key enabler, Courtney said. The bottom layer is connectivity and edge compute, with the ability to take in and pump out signals from legacy standards like SDI, as well as “tactile” surface like pushbuttons and consoles that operators “can feel and be creative with.”

The middle layer is the local network, where broadcast technology is transitioning from “FPGA purpose-built devices with fixed functionality” to standard servers with “agile functionality, the ability to spin things up and spin them down as and when you need it.” The top layer is the public cloud, used in combination with low-bandwidth transport technologies like SRT to help manage the unpredictable nature of the internet.

“We’re bringing this all together in one package, and underpinning this package you need a cloud-native software platform that allows you to discover devices, to control those devices, and coming back to that agile piece, that platform needs to enable you to spin things up and spin them down as you see fit,” Courtney said. “And we very much believe that as our customers learn to leverage this, they’ll absolutely see much better utilization in how they consume products and services.”

NextGen TV Developments

Along with its cloud initiatives, Sinclair continues to march ahead with the rollout of the ATSC 3.0, or NextGen TV, standard, said Mark Aitken, president of ONE Media and SVP of advanced technology for Sinclair. Close to 75% of the country is now reached by a 3.0 signal, he said, and an important development in 2024 will be adding second and even third 3.0 stations in markets where 3.0 is already on-air to enable new businesses like data distribution.

“[ATSC] 3.0 is headed into the picking-upsteam phase,” Aitken said. “We’re doubling up in major markets we’re already deployed in. What’s important about that is having additional capacity. The ability to bring more stations in the same market leads to additional capacity to do things other than simply television programming.”

Given the capacity crunch, 3.0 stations are also looking to use guide data broadcast in the over-the-air signal to steer consumers to “virtual channels” and interactive applications like betting and gaming that can be delivered to smart TVs through a broadband connection. Aitken said that functionality will be demonstrated at CES in Las Vegas next month.

“It’s enabling the broadcast equivalent on the internet, that’s tied directly into the ‘store’ that a station represents,” he said.

AI’s Prospects And Pitfalls

Not surprisingly, the opportunities and pitfalls of AI dominated much of the discussion. Cisco has just published an “AI readiness index” polling 8,000 businesses across 30 different markets, said Bedford, which indicated that plans are already in place for many companies, but actual rollouts are lagging behind.

“AI is the number one topic in both C-suites right now,” Bedford said. “Our data says that 95% of CEOs have an AI strategy documented, and they’re trying to figure out how they implement it.”

Tegna is still in the exploratory phase with most AI applications, said Kurt Rao, Tegna SVP and CTO. However, he noted that Tegna, like many other large broadcasters, has already been using AI-based closed captioning systems for years.

“What’s really new in the last 12 months is generative AI, the large language models,” Rao said. “We’re very bullish on what we think it could do on a number of fronts. On the content side of the house, we think there are opportunities there to create better products and/or improve the production workflow internally. That’s one vertical use case.”

Gen AI could also be used to automate back-office functions like invoice processing or T&E, he said, as well as in IT applications like monitoring network or device logs for cybersecurity purposes.

“We’re at the very beginnings of experimenting with this, so I don’t want to say we’ve proven anything out,” Rao said. “But in pilot mode or experimentation mode, we’re certainly seeing signals that it could be very helpful.”

Aitken said that Sinclair is collaborating with Korean broadcasters on using AI to add sign language functionality as an assistive service in ATSC 3.0 broadcasts. He also thinks AI could be helpful in optimizing data flows for data distribution applications that use 3.0 in combination with other wireless delivery networks like 4G or 5G, such as delivering software updates or infotainment to automobiles.

Fox appears to be farther ahead than most broadcasters in addressing AI. Cheesbrough described how Fox has already trained AI algorithms to produce catch-up highlights for streaming viewers who are joining a game already in progress, something it first did for FIFA World Cup coverage last year and is now providing with NFL coverage this fall.

Fox has worked with OpenAI to develop search and discovery functionality for its Tubi streaming app, which allows a viewer to type in a generic theme like “romantic Christmas movies from the ’80s” instead of having to search for a specific title. And Cheesbrough said Fox is also experimenting with “caution” on various production applications for news and sports coverage, including assistive tools for journalists and AI-generated match commentary.

“In the last year we’ve seen a lot of organic adoption, which is both a blessing and a curse, given some of the security rails you need to put around some of the public large language models,” said Cheesbrough of the rapid rise of AI in general.

On that note, Fox has created a method to protect its content as it is being “crunched up and spat out on the other end” by large language models from AI companies, Cheesbrough said. He described the system, which Fox aims to open-source in 2024, as “modern-day digital rights management.” Every piece of content that Fox publishes digitally is now fingerprinted using blockchain technology, with commercial terms of trade attached to it. That becomes the integration point for companies like OpenAI and Google to start working with Fox’s content.

“It’s very early days on that, but one of the biggest things it does is it allows attribution,” Cheesbrough said. “So, if you’re in ChatGPT and you search for something and some of our content has helped produce that result, we get attribution back for the generation of that result, and ultimately, we’d like to get paid for that as well. So those rails that we’re starting to build are super-strategic and critical from a distribution point of view.

“We’re pretty cautious about [AI],” he continued. “You know, the first wave of the internet, a lot of IP and content was harvested, and media companies and publishers didn’t get fair payment for that. We’re making sure that we go into this with optimism, but also some level of caution and control.”

To watch the video of the full webinar, click here.

The post Hybridity, AI Top Tech Trends For ’24 appeared first on TV News Check.

Nobody’s sitting on their hands, waiting for the election deluge. Media companies are picking up an increasing number of sports licensing rights to magnetize viewers and advertisers. They’re also deepening their connected TV forays. And while some streaming platforms have been bleeding cash, some executives are giving a clearer view on when profitability will be achieved.

Those are some of the most notable trends that came up during 10 quarterly earnings reports tracked by TVNewsCheck over the last couple of weeks.

The “big swings” that media companies are taking don’t always follow the sports and streaming patterns. For example, Gray TV’s brand new Assembly Studios reached a major milestone in September when it completed and delivered soundstages and various other assets to an anchor tenant, NBCUniversal. In the coming year, “Assembly Studios will no longer require significant capital investments by us,” said the company’s chairman-CEO, Hilton Howell, during Gray’s earnings call.

At the same time that Gray works to make the Atlanta-area studio complex a huge success, it’s also pursuing local broadcasting packages for professional basketball, hockey and baseball. And it’s already airing Phoenix Suns games across its Arizona footprint.

Tegna is on the prowl as well. “With the existing RSN and cable model in the final innings, the move of local sports from cable to broadcast is in the first inning of a new era,” said Dave Lougee, Tegna president-CEO.

The company’s San Antonio, Texas, CBS affiliate, KENS, has an exclusive deal to air San Antonio Spurs games. “As the current RSN bankruptcy proceeding plays out, look for more announcements to come,” Lougee added.

Sports is also a key part of Nexstar Media Group’s strategy as it gives The CW a programming makeover. “Demand for broadcast television [by sports-rights holders] has allowed us to enter into exclusive agreements with a number of major sports organizations, including our just-announced deal for WWE NXT in 2024; LIV Golf, which will return in 2024; ACC football and basketball, and NASCAR starting in 2025,” said Michael Biard, president and COO.

Over 15 new advertising partners came on board for the first full season of the ACC, including Verizon as the presenting sponsor and Subaru as the halftime sponsor, Biard added.

E.W. Scripps is playing the sports “card” in a slightly different way. It struck agreements with two National Hockey League teams: the Vegas Golden Knights and the Arizona Coyotes. To achieve the maximum benefit, Scripps transformed an Ion affiliate in Las Vegas to an independent, and it runs the Golden Knights games as anchor programming. That, in turn, impacted the MVPD carriage revenue.

“The new station, Vegas 34 [KMCC], joined our ABC affiliate there, expanding our advertising opportunity and distribution fees significantly. So, despite erosion in the nation’s pay TV landscape, Scripps is now getting higher rates and getting paid on more stations than before,” said Adam Symson, Scripps president and CEO.

While TV companies are all fired up by sports, they are also aflame with visions of big profits from streaming initiatives. FAST channels abound. And while the streaming platforms with big-ticket programming have been very costly, the breakeven point can now be seen by some, and they are attracting substantial audiences.

TelevisaUnivision said that its direct-to-consumer losses improved by 60% in the quarter, and its ViX streaming service surpassed 40 million monthly active users globally.

The Walt Disney Co. now expects that its Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+ streamers to reach the breakeven point in next year’s fourth quarter.

Comcast’s Peacock service is still posting losses, but its driving toward profitability with a hefty slate of sports. “With Peacock now, we have the most live sports of any of the streaming services,” said Comcast Chairman-CEO Brian Roberts. “I believe that’s a surprise to many people when they learn that.”

At Paramount Global, total revenue in the DTC division improved 38% over the same quarter last year. And advertising revenue for Paramount+ and the FAST platform PlutoTV increased 18%.

“We now believe 2022 was our peak year of streaming investment,” said Robert Bakish, Paramount’s president-CEO. “We’re clearly on the path to streaming profitability. And this continued DTC improvement will be a key driver of the total company earnings growth we expect next year.”

While Fox didn’t disclose a profitability scenario for its Tubi streamer, the company’s executive chairman-CEO, Lachlan Murdoch, said that revenue was up 30% in the quarter, driven by a 65% lift in total view time. “Tubi logged nearly 4 billion streaming hours in the first half of the calendar year,” he said. “It remains the No. 1 AVOD player, and the most watched free, ad-supported streaming service in the United States.”

When it comes to total revenue, units of the media companies that include TV stations (along with other assets) were almost entirely down. Comparing the quarter recently ended with the same period last year, the results mostly hovered around minus 10%.

The cyclical low tide for political revenue is a glaring reason why, although the ad category hasn’t disappeared completely. “We are seeing current political revenues trend above both 2021 and 2019 levels so far this year,” said Chris Ripley, Sinclair president-CEO.

“We expect strong growth of issue-oriented political advertising. And what appears to be several close Senate and House races in our footprint will accelerate this growth significantly as we get closer to next year’s election,” Ripley added.

When singling out core advertising (which excludes election spending), most companies reported low-single-digit gains.

The all-important automotive category was up substantially for several companies. At Tegna, for example, auto revenue rose for the fifth consecutive quarter. And in the third quarter, it was up double digits versus the same period last year.

Of all the ad categories, automotive was the only sector that showed widespread, positive reports from TV companies, although gains in home improvement, financial services, retail, consumer packaged goods and alcohol were all mentioned by at least one company.

The ad category that seemed to be consistently down for just about everyone was sports gambling. That was expected, explained Gray’s COO Sandy Breland. “That category cycled through heavy market-share spending at launch, and then stepped down to maintenance-level spending,” she said.

Media and entertainment ad spending also suffered, at least partially due to the Hollywood strikes and delayed release schedules for some movies.

On the retransmission front, several executives heralded the recent deal between Charter and Disney as an extremely positive sign — particularly because the MVPD can now add Disney’s streaming platforms to its offerings and drop weaker-performing Disney channels.

There’s a related trend at play: streaming platform prices are on the rise. Buying them on an a la carte basis is less cost-effective for consumers. So the perceived value of cable video packages could benefit when the streaming services are part of the MVPD bundles.

“It’s somewhat ironic that we’ve unbundled to re-bundle to unbundle to re-bundle,” said Comcast’s Roberts.

“We think that’s a very positive trend,” said Sinclair’s Ripley. “We’re seeing a right-sizing of the alternatives that people choose for their entertainment.”

The post Sports, FAST Channels Are Bright Spots For Broadcasters In A Down Quarter appeared first on TV News Check.

As chief legal officer, Fisher will lead the company’s legal department and oversee all legal functions across a broad range of disciplines including corporate, content creation and distribution, regulatory, ethics and compliance, and litigation and support Tegna’s long-term direction and growth.

Fisher joins Tegna from Vox Media where she was chief legal officer and corporate secretary reporting to Vox Media’s chairman and CEO for more than 15 years. She advised the company as it expanded to nearly 20 distinct media brands across all digital platforms, launched new digital advertising products, entered the realm of television and entertainment programming, and acquired new consumer businesses.

“Lauren is a strong, values-based leader with extensive knowledge of the evolving media landscape,” Lougee said. “She will champion our commitment to serving the greater good of our communities by supporting our content creation and growth initiatives while ensuring strong governance at all levels of the organization.”

Fisher said, “I am impressed by Tegna’s trusted local news brands and position within the broadcast industry. I am looking forward to supporting Tegna’s award-winning journalism while helping to foster continued growth across its businesses. My goal is to work with the top-notch Tegna team to enhance value for all stakeholders.”

Previously, Fisher was vice president, business and legal affairs at Hulu where she provided legal support during the service’s commercial launch. Prior to Hulu, she worked at AOL for seven years where she led the team that managed wide-ranging intellectual property matters, technology deals, rights and licensing, and various aspects of law relating to AOL’s business.

Earlier in her career, Fisher was associate counsel at The Vanguard Group and worked at the law firms of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld and Hoyle, Morris & Kerr.

Fisher graduated with honors from the University of Chicago Law School where she was a published member of the law review. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Pennsylvania where she majored in political history and concentrated on marketing and economics at The Wharton School.

She is co-chair of the copyright and trademark committee of the Media Law Resource Center and is a member of the Board of Directors at the News Media Alliance.

The post Tegna Names Lauren Fisher Chief Legal Officer appeared first on TV News Check.

Under the terms of the ASR, Tegna will repurchase $325 million in Tegna common shares from JPMorgan, with an initial delivery of approximately 17.3 million shares on Nov. 13. The final number of shares to be repurchased will be based on the average daily volume-weighted average price of Tegna shares during the term of the ASR, less a discount and subject to customary adjustments pursuant to the terms of the ASR.

The final settlement of the ASR is expected to be completed by the end of the first quarter of 2024, subject to acceleration at JPMorgan’s discretion.

Tegna completed its initial $300 million ASR program on Aug. 31, earlier than anticipated. Following the completion of the initial ASR and before entering Tegna’s third quarter blackout period on Sept. 16, the company “opportunistically repurchased an incremental $28 million of shares taking advantage of attractive market pricing.” The repurchases were made under Tegna’s existing share repurchase program approved by the board of directors in December 2020.

The initial $300 million ASR program reduced the company’s outstanding shares by approximately 18 million, including final settlement of approximately 3 million shares.

Since the termination of the merger agreement, Tegna has committed this year to nearly $800 million in share repurchases with approximately 45 million-50 million shares that will be retired by end of March 2024, which is more than 20% of shares outstanding prior to these actions. As of Sept. 30, Tegna had retired a total of 28.7 million shares, the company said.

The post Tegna Sets $325M Accelerated Share Repurchase appeared first on TV News Check.

Leaders from Fox Corp.’s Tubi, Tegna, Sinclair, Cisco Systems and Lawo will discuss streaming, cloud hybridity, the 2110 standard, IP networking and NextGen TV’s uncertain trajectory in the wide-ranging discussion.

“Our annual webinar predicting next year’s tech trends is always one of our most popular and thought-provoking sessions,” said Michael Depp, NewsCheckMedia chief content officer and TVNewsCheck editor. “With so many high stakes dynamics in place and AI looming over everything, this year’s discussion will have plenty to dig into.”

Panelists:

Paul Cheesbrough, Chief Executive Officer, Tubi Media Group — He oversees the operations and strategy of Fox’s standalone digital businesses including Tubi, Credible and Blockchain Creative Labs, as well as the digital platforms and teams that underpin Fox’s wider digital business in news, sports and entertainment.

Under Cheesbrough’s leadership, Tubi Media Group encompasses three lines of business that focus on streaming, advertising and engineering services: Tubi Streaming, Fox’s AVOD business; AdRise, a large-scale video advertising network that incorporates all of Fox’s video inventory; and Fox Digital Platforms Group, which contains Blockchain Creative Labs, Credible and platform services that support Fox’s news, sports and entertainment products.

Cheesbrough previously was chief technology officer and president of digital where he led the Fox Corp.’s technology teams and operations and oversaw the acquisition and management of Tubi.

Before the 2019 establishment of Fox as a standalone public company, Cheesbrough served as chief technology officer for 21st Century Fox, where he oversaw the company’s technology operations globally. Prior, he served as chief technology officer for News Corp, overseeing the enterprise technologies and digital products and platforms across the business as well as the technology investment portfolio. In these roles, Cheesbrough has led significant change and transformation through the implementation of modern technologies using internal teams and a range of established and earlier stage technology partners.

Before joining News Corp, Cheesbrough served as chief information officer at the Telegraph Media Group, where he pioneered the development of a wide range of new digital products. Earlier, he was the controller of digital media for the BBC, having started his career in IBM’s media division as a software engineer.

Kurt Rao, SVP and CTO, Tegna — He is charged with working across Tegna to drive the development and implementation of the company’s next-generation client and customer technology solutions in content, advertising, data and insights and media distribution.

Previously, Rao was chief information and technology officer for Time Inc., where he led the transformation and growth of the media publishing organization into a digital content platform company. In addition, he optimized technology operations across the organization and built platforms to support content across video and digital while enhancing consumer data analytics.

Register here.

The post TVN Webinar: Tech Leaders On Trends In ’24 appeared first on TV News Check.

“With the existing RSN and cable model in the final innings, the move of local sports from cable to broadcast is in the first inning of a new era,” Lougee said. “Professional sports teams and leagues are more acutely aware than anyone of this seismic shift in reach and distribution and are excited about the chance to reach all consumers, not just a smaller and smaller percentage of their addressable market.”

Lougee noted that Tegna’s San Antonio CBS affiliate, KENS, has an exclusive deal to air 11 San Antonio Spurs games during the current season. “As the current RSN bankruptcy proceeding plays out, look for more announcements to come. Given our large portfolio of strong stations in big sports home markets, we are very, very well positioned for the shift and opportunity in local sports.”

While the sports licensing landscape evolves, Tegna’s Locked On sports podcasting network is also growing. It has added four local FAST channel versions in the third quarter — in Atlanta, Dallas, Cleveland and Los Angeles. And more will launch in the fourth quarter.

Looking at the company’s Q3 more broadly: revenue was down 11%, compared with the same period last year, largely due to the off-political year. Core advertising (minus political) was “down slightly” in the quarter.

Auto advertising was up for the fifth consecutive quarter, and in the third quarter the category was up double digits, versus same time last year.

“The services category was also up double digits year over year, with strength in home services such as HVAC, electrical, pest control and plumbing,” commented Victoria Harker, executive vice president and CFO.

More challenged ad sectors included media, telecom, healthcare, restaurants and banking.

The Premion CTV/OTT ad platform added programmatic capabilities in the quarter, but its revenue was down due to the loss of a single national account. The platform is now focused on local OTT as a key driver moving forward. In fact, local advertising year-to-date is up double digits, according to Julie Heskett, Tegna’s SVP, financial planning and business operations and head of investor relations.

In the fourth quarter, the company is expecting GAAP revenue to drop mid to high teens, since the company garnered $179 million from political spending for the midterms during the same quarter last year.

Political revenue will boost the numbers substantially next year, although Tegna doesn’t have stations in many of the critical primary markets, Lougee said. Tegna stations will also be supercharged next year by the Olympics and the Super Bowl.

On the network affiliate renewal front, Tegna inked a multi-year deal with ABC that covers 13 markets and 9% of the U.S. The agreement encompasses 11 million households. “We believe our successful negotiation with ABC highlights the win-win long term relationships we have with our programming partners,” Lougee said.

Tegna will negotiate another affiliate contract before year’s end: with NBC. All told, 60% of Tegna’s Big 4 subscribers are up for renewal by the close of 2023, Harker said.

Lougee noted that the company’s revenue from subscriptions “continues to provide stable and predictable cash flow supported by contractual rate increases partially offset by subscriber declines. We expect to re-price approximately 30% of our traditional subs by the end of this year, further improving visibility into our outlook.”

Tegna completed an initial $300 million accelerated stock repurchase (ASR) program at the end of August, then repurchased an incremental $28 million of shares in September. “Total share reduction as of the end of the third quarter was 29 million. Beyond this, as announced in August, our second ASR program targeting $325 million in repurchases will kick off this week,” Harker said.

“We expect approximately 45 to 50 million shares to be retired by the end of March 2024, based on current market prices, reflecting more than 20% of shares outstanding prior to us undertaking these actions,” she added.

The post Tegna Sees More Opportunities For It In Sports appeared first on TV News Check.

Subscription revenue was a 3Q record $378 million, up slightly year-over-year, driven by contractual rate increases, partially offset by subscriber declines.

Advertising and marketing services (AMS) revenue was $312 million, down 3% year-over-year. Advertising trends in the third quarter showed sequential improvement compared to the second quarter. Automotive advertising revenue continued to show strong year-over-year growth for the fifth consecutive quarter. Underlying advertising trends were down less than 1% year-over year, adjusting for the loss of a single national Premion account. As noted earlier this year, this impact will continue to be felt throughout 2023.

Net income was $96 million on a GAAP basis, or $78 million on a non-GAAP basis.

Total company adjusted EBITDA was $166 million, representing a decrease of 38% compared to the same quarter of 2022, as expected, due to the absence of high-margin political revenue from mid-term elections and an increase in programming expenses.

GAAP operating expenses were $579 million, up 1% year-over-year. Non-GAAP operating expenses of $576 million, up 1% year-over-year, finished in-line with the company’s guidance range, with the increase driven primarily by programming costs, partially offset by operational expense management improvements. Free cash flow was $112 million for the quarter.

Total cash at the end of the quarter was $553 million.

Dave Lougee, president-CEO, said: “Tegna is operating from a position of strength within the broadcast industry, and we are seeing positive momentum across our organization. Our management team and board are laser focused on generating shareholder value and building a track record of disciplined capital allocation as Tegna advances its strategy as a standalone company. We are pleased with our initial actions to return cash accumulated during the pendency of the merger process by retiring a significant amount of shares. Our balance sheet affords us the unique opportunity to pursue organic growth and bolt-on M&A opportunities while also offering shareholders our recently increased dividend, as well as share repurchases. We fully expect 2024 will be another strong year driven by our favorable portfolio of stations in key markets benefiting from a robust presidential election cycle, the Summer Olympic Games, and the Super Bowl.

“We are pleased to share that we will surpass our previously announced three-quarters of a billion dollars commitment of capital return to shareholders. During the third quarter, we opportunistically repurchased an incremental $28 million of shares in the open market under our existing share repurchase program. The initial $300 million ASR program we entered in June was completed at the end of August, earlier than anticipated. A second ASR program of $325 million is expected to commence this week. Taken together with the $136 termination fee from Standard General that was satisfied through the transfer of Tegna common stock, we are now committing this year to nearly $800 million in share repurchases.

“We are pleased to announce we’ve reached a comprehensive multi-year agreement renewal with ABC. Our strong relationships with our valued network partners have been built over decades and led to mutual success based on common goals. This renews Tegna’s ABC network affiliations in 13 markets across the country, which cover nine percent of the U.S. and serve nearly 11 million households. Our partnership combines ABC’s popular entertainment, sports and news programming with our strong local stations and large audiences.

“Turning to our results, we achieved a new third quarter record for subscription revenue. Our high-margin subscription revenue remains a core driver of our cash flow and, looking ahead, we will be repricing approximately 30 percent of our traditional subscribers at the end of this year. “Advertising and marketing services revenue saw sequential improvement driven by improving trends in key verticals such as automotive. Automotive, our largest category within AMS, has steadily recovered and is generating strong year-over-year growth for the fifth consecutive quarter.

“Finally, all of us at Tegna wish to congratulate our colleagues at WWL in New Orleans for receiving a News Emmy from the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences for Outstanding Regional News Story: Investigative Report for The Man Behind the Warehouse, an in-depth report on how more than 800 nursing homes residents ended up living in squalor after Hurricane Ida. We are proud that the investigation has contributed to the changing of laws, which will positively impact numerous lives in the community.”

Tegna declared a regular quarterly dividend of 11.375 cents per share, payable on Jan. 2, 2024, to stockholders of record as of the close of business on Dec. 8, 2023.

Read the company’s report here.

The post Tegna Q3 Revenue Drops 11% appeared first on TV News Check.

At the same time, content players must deal with the streaming platforms’ reluctance to share critical data that can help advertisers appreciate their value proposition — and help the channels understand how they can give audiences what interests them. Platforms are also winnowing out some channels. And the lack of one agreed-upon currency is a sticking point (as is true more broadly in the video space).

Those factors all bubbled up during TVNewsCheck’s TV2025 conference’s panel session “Go FAST, Go AVOD: Charting a Streaming Revenue Strategy for Local Media.”

Jennifer Donohue, SVP of Disney Advertising Sales, Local, characterized the streaming space as a “dynamic marketplace” that is at least partially fueled by advertisers’ desire to do more with fewer dollars. In speaking more generally about the local business, including streamed content, she said that “the number of advertisers is up 50% this year, and that’s really spurred by self-service. Our streaming platform continues to grow because of engagement and our ability to offer measurement and targetability.”

Local advertisers are alert to the opportunity. “They look at local representatives as local marketing experts. They’re listening to them. They understand that audiences are in different places,” said Tom Sly, VP of enterprise strategy at The E.W. Scripps Co. “We’re seeing much better engagement on the local level — with CTV-FAST [along with] O&O inventory — than we are on the national side. It’s been a great business for us.”

Tegna is garnering “hundreds of millions of views per month” in the AVOD space, specifically on YouTube, where it places various shortform content. The lion’s share of it was published prior to 2023, said Adam Ostrow, the company’s chief digital officer. “It’s helping us monetize a library of older content.” A significant number of viewers are outside the market in which the content was produced.

On the FAST front, Tegna stations have apps on Roku. “That business is growing really fast for us as well. That’s where you can get the 24/7 feeds,” Ostrow said.

Ticker News finds its revenue in a different way, through native advertising. Its FAST channels are streamed on various platforms around the world. Hosts interview “thought leaders” who speak on such topics as cybersecurity. “We have a person talking about an issue, and ‘here’s how we’re fixing it.’ So it’s not a sales pitch, but information to help the viewer understand a situation,” said Ahron Young, CEO of Ticker.

All of the station groups represented on the panel are clearly gearing up for the election cycle ahead. BIA Advisory Services is projecting that local digital media will rope in $117.8 million during the 2024 season, or 22.8% of the entire local pie. (Those figures include not only over-the-top, but other sectors as well, such as email, newspapers and mobile.)

Scripps has a dedicated election office for ad sales, which includes a digital team, Sly said. The overcrowding that is sure to take place in the spot market should push some advertisers over into the streaming side of the business.

“We saw this in ’22,” Ostrow said. “Two or three months before, not only did our rates go up, but our fill rate went up.”

“What we’ve learned is that it’s not just waiting for the cycle to come. Political is now year ’round. From presidential to statewide to local elections to runoffs,” said Donohue, who added that Disney has built out the election ad sales process for the streaming business.

Then there are the challenges. The session’s moderator, Adam Wiener, founder of Continuous Media, asked the panelists to discuss the lack of consensus about what currency should be used for transactions. “We need buyers all buying the same way,” said Sonali Pathak, SVP, business development and strategy, local, at NBCUniversal. “That’s the dream we all have.” She expressed hope that there would be some resolution to that friction point in the near future.

Sly seemed less optimistic about how soon the issue will get resolved. “We can’t afford — especially local broadcast — to subscribe to six different currencies. It doesn’t scale for us. There has to be some meeting in the middle for the industry,” he said.

There are also some problems with the streamers. Wiener noted, “It’s increasingly becoming more difficult to negotiate with them, and almost impossible at times to get data from them.”

“These are partnerships, and a partnership should be two-way. I call it distribution equity. We need to make sure that content creators are getting the data they need to monetize. Buyers want that data,” Sly said. He added that Scripps is working with the platforms to improve the terms related to data.

There’s also an oversupply of FAST channels and economic headwinds. Platforms are dropping some channels. “I don’t disagree with the culling of channels. That’s every platform’s prerogative. We want to make sure there’s quality content out there, but the criteria they use should be fair,” Pathak said. She noted that there are also concerns about the placement of channels on the platforms.

“That’s where data matters, not only from an ad sales perspective, but creating channels that really serve the audience,” she said. “It’s great for both sides, the platforms and for us.”

Read more coverage of TV2025 here.

The post Local Media Seek FAST Track To Political Revenue appeared first on TV News Check.

At Tegna, executives feel they’ve landed on a solution with Daily Blast Live, an hourlong talker that pairs five hosts to gab about current events and celebrity news. The Denver-shot show is a lean production and, its producers say, a utility player in the daytime rota. They say it’s also a likely harbinger of shows to come — cheap, developed by station groups, rather than studios and staying away from the news territory over which the groups are zealously proprietary.

In this Talking TV conversation, Brian Weiss, VP of entertainment programming and multicast networks at Tegna and Burt Dubrow, Daily Blast Live’s executive producer, share why they feel the show works and where station groups will need to turn to fill syndication gaps left by the studios.

Episode transcript below, edited for clarity.

Michael Depp: Hello, and welcome to Talking TV. I’m Michael Depp, editor of TVNewsCheck. We all know that the syndicated TV market is shrinking, but what’s going to be left when the smoke clears?

My guests today are hopeful that their syndicated offering, Daily Blast Live, will continue to be one of the shows left standing. Daily Blast Live is a weekday hour now in its seventh season, produced and distributed by Tegna, that finds its five hosts riffing on current events with a heavy emphasis on celebrity news. My guests today are its executive producer, Burt Dubrow and Brian Weiss, the VP of entertainment programing and multicast networks for Tegna.

We’ll be talking about what makes this show a “sustainable option for broadcasters’ content needs” in Weiss’ words, how they see the syndication market continuing to evolve as broadcasters’ content needs widen but their budget budgets shrink. We’ll be right back with that conversation.

Welcome, Brian Weiss and Burt Dubrow, to Talking TV.

Burt Dubrow: Thank you, good to be here.

Brian Weiss: Thanks.

Burt, you launched The Sally Jesse Raphael Show and you helped to launch Jerry Springer into public consciousness — may your maker forgive you for that, perhaps, in some regards.

Burt Dubrow: What a way to begin! My goodness! OK, OK. My maker, yeah.

But Daily Blast Live is your baby. So, what’s the elevator pitch for it for those who are unfamiliar?

Burt Dubrow: Well, it is a live, topical show. I say it’s sort of like a contemporary version of The View meets the third half hour of The Today Show. That’s kind of what it is to help, you know, for someone to relate to another show. That’s what it is. We’re a very opinionated show, a point of view show. We talk about what our motto is. If you’re talking about it, we’re talking about it. And it’s true. It’s true. If you’re talking about something. Chances are when you put on DBL, we’ll be talking about it as well.

And topically, I said at the top, it was sort of celebrity oriented. Do you veer away from that patch at all?

Burt Dubrow: I don’t veer away, but it’s not celebrity oriented. I mean, we’re proud to say — not that there’s anything wrong with celebrities, but the show really revolves around the five people that are sitting at that desk. It’s really all about them. It’s about their chemistry.

And I will tell you there all the comments or many of the comments, most of the comments that we get are really just that. Some people have said that if Friends had a TV talk show, this would be it. And it’s real. And, you know, everything I say, and I hear it come out of my mouth when I say it sounds so cliche, but it really, in fact, is true. They really are friendly. They hang out after work, but they’re able to get behind that desk and really go at it, sometimes argue, express their opinion. But as we say at the end of the show, it wouldn’t be surprising for them to go out and have lunch together or drink or whatever. That’s really where the focus of the show is.

I want to talk a little bit more about the hosts in just a couple of minutes. But first, Brian, Tegna is behind this show. Where did the idea start? Did Burt come to you with the kernel of the show, or did you say, Hey, Tegna needs an entertainment magazine for its stations?

Brian Weiss: No, actually, in fact, Daily Blast Live has been around at Tegna actually before Burt or I were here. And actually, I can say this, and I sincerely mean this. I give our leadership — Dave Lougee, our CEO, in particular— a lot of credit for taking a chance.

You know, seven seasons ago, actually under a different moniker, I believe it was called Bold when it first launched and eventually evolved into Daily Blast Live. There was kind of a goal where Tegna basically said, I think we can do a show in the format that we take typically syndicated programing but build it on our own. Let’s build something really topical that makes sense for our stations that sort of blends this idea of news and opinion and covers the topics of the day that doesn’t compete with our news programing but is adjacent to our news programing, can be a really solid lead into our news programing. And let’s sort of take the reins on it.

We can also produce it, by the way, in Denver, where Burt is at KUSA, which is one of our flagship stations, and do it on a cost model that probably is substantially lower than certainly at the time we were paying for some of these sorts of A-list shows.

And so, it’s been really a labor of love and an investment for the company, a show that we continue to invest in. And we’ve added resources, you know, over its seven-year evolution, to really make it the show it is today.

And what I would say is, you know, Michael, we built the show seven years ago really as a show that would perform well on Tegna stations. And we’re really hitting an inflection point now where it is not just a Tegna show, it is really becoming a sort of national syndicated show that a lot of our broadcast peers are finally taking notice of. And finally sort of seeing the value of the show can present to them both in terms of audience, but also, as you mentioned in the lead in, this idea of sustainable economics.

Brian, what’s the time period that this tends to run in? And what is it typically up against?

Brian Weiss: Daytime. So, this is offered typically as a daytime show. We have different windows that we make it available. But typically, it is in the afternoon hours. You know, most Tegna stations carry it at either 2:00 or 3:00 in the local market. We do also offer a 30-minute access show that stations can use on delay. So, it’s been a really good sort of daytime utility player for our affiliates.

The relatively low production cost is obviously a key part of the value proposition here. You mentioned it’s shot at KUSA, a Tegna Station in Denver. Does it have its own studio there? And do you have to work around newscast production or shared space?

Brian Weiss: It’s got an amazing studio, which we’re really fortunate to have when the vision sort of came alive for Daily Blast Live and for recording it in Denver. There was a studio that was available for it. And luckily Mark Cornetta, our SVP of media operations and our general manager there, has been extremely supportive of it. But it’s a real operation. It is totally standalone and totally separate from what happens with the news product at the station. But it’s become sort of its own sort of standalone team and it’s really an amazing production. Burt, you want to just talk a little bit about, you know, the sort of operation that happens there?

Burt Dubrow: Yeah, what I was going to say is that, you know, I have I’ve been fortunate enough to do this several times the same way. For instance, you mentioned Sally. Sally started in Saint Louis, Mo., at KSDK, which is one of our stations, coincidentally. Jerry started at WLW in Cincinnati. So, I’m sort of used to working with a station like that.

I have to say that out of all the ones that I’ve done, Mark Cornetta is probably the most supportive person that general manager that we’ve ever had. So, we give him kudos because he’s really helped this show a lot. But as Brian said, we stand on our own. We’re our own production. News does their thing down the hall and we’re in a locked studio and we do our thing.

Let’s talk about the hosts, Burt, you brought them up before. Obviously, the chemistry that they have with each other seems to be … the show kind of lives or dies around that, doesn’t it?

Burt Dubrow: You know, each executive producer that does what I do, I think has probably different likes, dislikes, strengths. I’ve always been a talent guy. I’ve always been all about the talent. I’m not a big concept person. I’m more of a talent person.

And I’ll tell you, when I got here to Denver, it was a different show. It was a much softer show. It was a lot more trending, like you said, celebrity kinds of topics. And we changed that according to the people that are home available watching daytime television and these hosts, and here comes another cliche, but I’m going to say it are better than any hosts that I’ve ever worked with in my life. Or frankly, I would not be sitting here talking to you. They are that good. People come in the studio and watch the show and cannot believe that there’s no real teleprompter script. There is for intros, but that’s it. They just go.

Where are they coming from? What’s their background?

Burt Dubrow: Well, Sam Schacher, who’s the host, was actually one of my co-hosts on the Dr. Drew Pinsky Show for CNN that I did before I came to DBL. Al Jackson, stand-up comic, still standup comic. He tours on the weekends. Erica Cobb was on the radio all over the country. Tory Shulman did a little bit of stand up or she likes to say was working on an ice cream shop right before she got DBL. Who am I leaving out here?

Brian Weiss: Jeff Schroeder!

Burt Dubrow: Jeff Schroeder, Big Brother. That’s how everybody knows him. He was on Big Brother. Turns out that the lady that won Big Brother that year, Jordan, he married. They moved to Denver. They have two kids. And here we are. A lot of children have been born actually, since we’ve been since we’ve been doing the show.

And Michael, just one thing — I just wanted to say this about, you know, sort of our cast of talent. You know, they are able to have conversations that, to be honest, other networks, other shows have not been able to thread the needle in terms of having really good diverse dialogues about sometimes some prickly issues, different sides of the political spectrum, you name it, various cultural differences. They are able to have those conversations because they genuinely love each other in a way that never veers into the toxic. And that, I think, is something that we’re really proud of.

I’m curious about the direction of a show like this. Obviously, you have some pre-selected topics that you’re going to touch on in an hour. And then this is sometimes cut down to half an hour for some stations. Is the director kind of nudging this along or when the conversation lags a little or are they kind of flagging or let’s move on to the next topic, or is it all living with the host? The shot clock starts, and they just go to the end?

Burt Dubrow: Well, they’re not that good. No, here’s the way it works. At 6:30 in the morning, we do a call with myself and our executive producer and the producers, and we literally choose the topics that morning. So, at 6:30 this morning, we chose the topics. The producers pitched them to us, and then we decide what the show is going to be at that point. We’re off the phone. The producers get to work. We all figure out how we’re going to do this.

8:15 we get on a call with the talent. We tell them what it is. They throw their two cents in and then we have a production meeting a half hour before in person with everybody. And that’s how it works.

As far as on the air is concerned. Sure, we move it along when we feel we need to move it along. Absolutely. But generally speaking, it’s their thing up there. It’s not really our thing. But, you know, they’ll be the first ones to say, hey, tell us when you want us to move it along and get to the next topic. They’re a breeze that way. There is not a lot of ego there. And that’s very, very unique, very unique. And that’s how it’s done.

There are other shows in this kind of category, like The Talk, The View, where you have people having a conversation. Not to psychologize too much, but I’m also curious about what you think audiences are getting from this. Is it being a fly on the wall for a conversation happening among people who genuinely like each other and have good rapport? Is it something vicarious that they’re getting from this dynamic?

Burt Dubrow: The answer is yes. All of that. The fly on the wall thing is a good way to put it. But I think for the most part, based on comments and surveys that we’ve done, they’re tuning in to see what these people have to say. That’s really what they’re doing. And they’re tuning in to see the fun. They’re seeing them poke at each other. I mean, and they really do poke at each other. And, you know, it’s at the point now where the producers know what to put on there. So, we know how the poking will go, you know, we know them so well.

I would say that we’re probably the only show that’s been in development for six years. We’ve made our mistakes. And I think, as Brian said, the industry is starting to really recognize us. And again, that’s how a lot of those — the other two shows — that you mentioned that I did started the exact same way as this: slow build, slow build, make your mistakes, figure out who your audience is, boom. And then take off.

And Tegna, god bless them, have been nice enough — smart enough, too, I would say — to let this thing percolate, percolate and grow. And as Brian said, I know I’m repeating, but Dave Lougee and Lynn Beall are the ones really behind that that let us do what we do.

How, in that process of percolation, how important has social media become for the show to keep its brand vivacious?

Burt Dubrow: Oh, well, that’s a darn good question. And Brian and I are looking and laughing at each other. Brian should answer that. But I think you have to have social media today because it’s something that’s very relevant. It presses certain buttons and if you don’t have it, you don’t appear to be relevant.

But I’d have to say that social media did not drive the audience watching this show. Promotion, publicity and doing a good show and letting it grow on its own is what made it happen. Don’t get me wrong, we have a nice social media footprint, but it’s not … I would say the person who could figure out how to take social media and let it make the audience bigger on broadcast is going to be a trillionaire because it really it just doesn’t translate. They’re two different audiences.

Brian Weiss: Yeah, I’ll echo that, Michael. And we are laughing because this is a conversation Burt and I have quite regularly about where our resources go, what our priorities are.

What I would say is that the idea, the show as it was formed, it was this idea that it would be extremely interactive. It would use a lot of social media. We do things like right now, if you watch the show online or on YouTube, you’ll actually be able to interact with the hosts during the commercial break.

So, there’s definitely a social layer and a digital layer. We have a really good following on Instagram. We’ve actually had some really good, successful moments on TikTok, some really short, pithy interactions that are sort of hilarious and show our hosts sort of ribbing each other, which have gone hyper viral on TikTok, which have been great.

That said, we keep shoveling coal on the fire of social media with the hope that it’s going to drive a younger audience to tune in. And as Burt said, I think that remains elusive, not just for us, but for linear television in general. And it remains an ambition and sort of a priority. But no one has really cracked the code on how you deliver, particularly a younger audience, to tune in, you know, say, in the afternoon. It’s a hard equation, but important.

Burt Dubrow: I think one of the important things for this show, for me anyway, and for Brian, is that we know our audience. We do not hide behind anything here. We know who’s watching at daytime. You know, I can give you a long list of things that I do horribly and a pretty short list of things that I do decent.

I know this audience and I’ve known them for a long time, and they have not changed. A lot of them, maybe politically, it’s you know, they’re a little bit more aware. But we are not afraid to say who our audience is, and we speak to them. That’s probably the first thing I did when I joined the show was get the audience together.

And that audience being demographically?

Burt Dubrow: Fifty-plus women.

Burt Dubrow: Fifty-plus women. That’s who’s home.

Let’s take the last leg of this conversation into the wider realm of the syndication market overall, which, you know, to say that it’s constricting would be putting it very, very mildly. Are we done seeing that dynamic or does syndication still have further pounds to shed?

Brian Weiss: It remains a question that we ask ourselves as well. By the way, Tegna, a collection of 56 local news stations, needs to fill programing, right? We need to put compelling programing on the air every day. And as we look at the landscape, it’s no secret that the traditional Hollywood studios have canceled a lot of marquee shows. They’ve pulled back on some of the ones that are still around. They’ve gone sort of library or half library. And we’re waiting to see, just as the rest of the industry is, whether those studios are going to reinvest money in daytime talk shows, syndicated shows, that sort of thing. Or will they put it toward streaming or movies or whatever else it might be? We’re sort of waiting on that.

What I can say is. The days of station groups like ours and our peers investing huge amounts of money in a new show with a really top-tier name associated with it upfront before we really know if that show will perform and really drive audience, I think those days either are past or are slipping away.

If something really great comes, we’ll certainly be interested, we’ll certainly be open and talking about it. But I think shows more similar to Daily Blast Live that are produced affordably, that are topical every day and new every day, and also, they are adjacent to news, which remains our core product, I think those shows are really the ones that will be in it for the long run.

We’ll still evaluate everything that comes out. We’re in conversations with other groups about new shows and things that they’re considering to bring out a year from now. But I think that the days of us sort of betting in hopes that the audience will be there, that’s very unlikely.

And one thing I would just say is, you know, to use Denver as an example, Daily Blast Live does better numbers than Dr. Phil was doing, Drew Barrymore, the list goes on. It was beating the sort of marquee name shows. And so, if station groups are suddenly being offered compelling shows like Daily Blast Live that performed just about as well as those shows. And I want to be very transparent about this. Right now, we’re offering the show at no cost to station groups. That’s a much better equation than writing a seven-figure check. So, that’s where I think the landscape is really evolving.

Burt Dubrow: Can I jump in?

Go ahead.

Burt Dubrow: Do you mind? Yeah, I have to say this because I really feel very strongly about it. It’s a bit personal, but if you look at these other shows and take the other two that I did, when I started those shows, nobody knew who those people were. No one knew Sally. I thought Sally Jessy Raphael was three people. I had no idea. Nobody knew Jerry.

If you make a list of these shows that were successful—name vs. no name — I think you’d be quite surprised. If I could snap my fingers and get in a room with every general manager and just explain to them that that celebrity thing works the first three or four weeks or even the first three or four weeks before you go on the air because you get all this publicity. But when all is said and done, that person has to know how to do a show, has to be compelling enough, and you must hire producers that know how to do talk.

And I think part of the reason that this is sort of eroding is a lot of it is these shows are lousy. They’re not good. I mean they don’t know how to compel an audience. I think there is a way to do talk that works. So, I think that goes into what Brian says. That’s all.

Well, the problem is there’s not very much in the pipeline anymore in syndication. I mean, I think few people would argue that the $25 million talk show has much of a life in front of it. I mean, they’re just not working out. They’re too expensive. Obviously, costs are winnowing down a lot. So, it’s interesting that a show like this or, you know, the shows, Burt, that you worked on before started as local shows where people are trying that again now. They’re trying local talk shows. They’re trying things to see, OK, this works in this market. Can we widen it out to the region? And if it works in the region, maybe does it have a chance for national play? But, you know, Brian, to your point about waiting to see what the studios are going to do, do you really have a lot of faith that they are going to take any of their chips away from streaming and reinvest in syndication?

Brian Weiss: Well, here’s what I would say. Do I have a ton of faith? I’m not sure I have a ton of faith. What I would say, though, is I think all of those studio groups are looking at their profitability statements. And actually, in many cases, the pendulum is swinging back to what has worked for them in the past, where streaming is not necessarily the profitability boon that they expected it would be.

And so, you know, a lot of them are shifting back to doing things like traditional licensing. And so, it’s possible. It’s possible. I don’t know if it’s probable, but it’s possible that some of them may say, you know what, linear television remains a force in viewership habits.

It may be changing, the landscape may be evolving, but linear television is here to stay and we’re going to invest but do it in a leaner way. Do it in a way that perhaps the talent isn’t paid, you know, an absolute fortune upfront, but benefits on the long tail. There may be different ways to think about those things.

I also think a lot of studios will begin to engage with their broadcast partners about doing these things, potentially as joint ventures, as partnerships, that sort of thing, where maybe two broadcast groups come in on a show and help them build it from the ground up. That, of course, is not the frothy economics that it used to be for a studio that gets to keep effectively everything, but it reduces their risk, and it encourages the parties to commit to have distribution for a long term.

We’re not doing that. I can tell you there’s nothing like, you know, that we’re prepared to announce, but it wouldn’t surprise me if that’s where the dialogue goes. And I just want to point to, you know, the news peg that we’re here today to talk about is the idea that our friends over at Sinclair — and we give them a lot of credit — they’re picking up Daily Blast Live in 20 markets. That is an example of broadcast groups collaborating with each other in perhaps a way that they have not before.

Well, I think there may be a scenario where if our friends out in Los Angeles aren’t as willing to create compelling television for our needs, we’re going to do it for each other. Now, we have not been keen to take other groups’ news programs, for example, but shows like Daily Blast Live, which are much more a topical opinion and talk show, do have sort of the characteristics that other broadcast groups are excited about. And so, I wouldn’t be surprised if more broadcast groups start to say, “You know what, maybe we should just lock arms together and develop programing like this for each other.”

On that front, Brian, so Sinclair, which is picking up this show across a lot of its markets, they’re working on syndicated material themselves. They’ve got Anthony Zuiker developing documentary material, a game show, other things. Are you receptive to potentially buying programing from them?

Brian Weiss: Definitely. And we’ll continue conversations about those things. I would say, you know, the game show example, you know, we have not had specific conversations with Sinclair about any of their game product. But generally speaking, we know that game shows work for our audience. They continue to be pretty stellar performers. And so, if there is a show that, you know, Sinclair or another group is producing that that’s sort of in that genre that doesn’t, you know, intrude on our news values, that has really total separation. That’s the type of thing absolutely we would at least consider, especially if the economics are right.

My last question to both of you, given a sort of inexorable winnowing down of the syndicated marketplace, what is going to survive? What do you see as the pillars of programing that will continue to have viability?

Brian Weiss: Well, let me take one stab at that. And I would like Burt, who, you know, has a lot of, you know, sort of sage wisdom for what he knows works on television. What I would just say is, you know, Tegna and broadcast companies, you have seen — and you will continue to see — us investing substantially in local and substantially in news. And I think you’re going to see that across our broadcast peers where, you know, sort of our moat remains, that we have a connection with the local community. We do very well in terms of their trust with our news. And by the way, advertisers really like news. And so, it wouldn’t surprise me if station groups really invest heavily in more news content, higher quality news content, more investigative news content.

And where we produce shows that are that are filling the void of syndication, it will be the sort of topical conversation that Daily Blast Live does. I’ll just use an example. We have a Mom Squad show that’s produced out of Cleveland. That’s a really good example of moms talking about local issues. That’s the type of programing that I think is going to remain, where maybe the A-list celebrity driven, expensive, high-polished talk show doesn’t or is dramatically reduced, we’ll fill it with that, which is topical programing that really genuinely matters in our communities.

Burt, I think you will have better perspective just in general about what will make good television, because ultimately, we want to put on great television.

Burt Dubrow: [Look, I think everything that Brian said I would agree with and would have said not as well, but I would have said the same thing. You know, game and news during the day is sort of a good thing, and it always has been a good thing. I don’t think the economics have changed, but I’m not sure people’s tastes have changed all that much. Give them something good and compelling with hosts that are likable, and I think you’ve got a good shot as long as the economics are right.

My good friend, who we lost a while ago, Bill Geddie, who created The View and was with Barbara Walters, called me, oh, gosh, about six, eight months ago and said: ‘Do you realize what you’ve done?’ And I thought, Oh, sure, what did I do now? He said: ‘Your model is perfect for what’s going on now, what you’re doing and the economics of it and the production quality and the production value is exactly what the market needs now.’

And I said to him, I’d love to let you know we planned the whole thing. We knew exactly what was coming. And of course, we didn’t. But I do believe he is right. And I think that’s what Brian was saying earlier. I mean, kiddingly, you know, just jokingly, I could look at a GM and say, look, we’ll give you just as bad a rating as any other show. It just won’t cost as much. You know, but the reality is we’ve got a quality program with five people that are brilliantly talented at what they do, and the price is right.

OK, well, we will leave it at that. Burt Dubrow and Brian Weiss, thanks for joining me today to talk about Daily Blast Live and the syndication market at large.

Brian Weiss: Thank you so much for having us.

Burt Dubrow: Thanks for having us.

Thanks to all of you for watching and listening. There’s a new episode of Talking TV most Fridays. You can catch our entire back catalog at TVNewsCheck.com and on our YouTube channel, also in audio version and most of the places where you get a podcast. And see you next time.

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Wieder joins KARE from Tegna’s WVEC, the ABC affiliate in Norfolk, Va., where he has been president and general manager since 2019. During Wieder’s tenure as general manager, the station grew audience share, digital sales revenue and was honored with 11 Regional Edward R. Murrow Awards, including Overall Excellence in 2020.

Wieder ensured the station emphasized community-focused journalism, including gathering police chiefs from the area’s seven largest cities for a televised Town Hall seeking solutions to the growing gun violence epidemic among teenagers in Hampton Roads.

The station created the award-winning documentary, “20 and Odd: Africans’ Arrival in 1619” to tell the story of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in Hampton. He guided the station’s community response to numerous severe weather events and community engagement efforts, including helping to raise a record $1.8 million for local nonprofits through the Peninsula Community Foundation.

Prior to becoming WVEC general manager and since 2012, Wieder was its executive news director. He joined the station in 2003 as a senior producer for evening newscasts before being promoted to executive producer in 2007.

Wieder has participated in the NAB Broadcast Leadership Training Program and the Tegna Executive Leadership Program, an executive development program to prepare next-generation leaders at the company. Prior to joining Tegna, Wieder was a reporter, anchor and producer at TV stations in Richmond, Va.; Chattanooga, Tenn.; and Macon, Ga.

“Doug’s steady, results-driven management style has consistently delivered exceptional results during his tenure at WVEC,” said Larry Delia, Tegna senior vice president, media operations. “His invaluable expertise across news, innovation and community engagement are perfectly aligned with KARE’s brand, people and award-winning journalism. We’re excited to have his leadership, team-building skills and community focus at KARE to ensure the station continues to serve the needs of all Minnesotans.”

Wieder is a cum laude graduate of the University of Georgia with a bachelor’s degree in journalism. He is a past president of the Virginias AP Broadcasters group.

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“As fans gear up for an epic season, we’re pleased to partner with the Spurs and the NBA to bring these 11 heart-pounding games to every single household across San Antonio,” said Brad Ramsey, Tegna senior vice president, media operations. “As local broadcasters, our stations have always been the home for live, local sports and lifelong sports fans. We’re incredibly proud of this partnership with the world-class Spurs Sports & Entertainment organization.”

KENS tips off its Spurs game coverage when the team hosts the Los Angeles Clippers on Monday, Nov. 20. Other key games airing on KENS include one of the annual I-35 Series games in Austin, as the Spurs host the defending NBA Champion Denver Nuggets at Moody Center on Friday, March 15.

All Spurs games airing on KENS include (game tip-offs indicated in Central Time):

• Monday, Nov. 20: Los Angeles Clippers @ San Antonio Spurs, 7 p.m.
• Friday, Nov. 24: San Antonio Spurs @ Golden State Warriors, 9 p.m.
• Saturday, Dec. 23: San Antonio Spurs @ Dallas Mavericks, 7:30 p.m.
• Friday, Jan. 12, 2024: Charlotte Hornets @ San Antonio Spurs, 9 p.m.
• Saturday, Jan. 27: Minnesota Timberwolves @ San Antonio Spurs, 7:30 p.m.
• Saturday, Feb. 3: Cleveland Cavaliers @ San Antonio Spurs, 7:30 p.m.
• Saturday, Feb. 10: San Antonio Spurs @ Brooklyn Nets, 5 p.m.
• Thursday, Feb. 29: Oklahoma City Thunder @ San Antonio Spurs, 7:30 p.m.
• Tuesday, March 12: Houston Rockets @ San Antonio Spurs, 7:30 p.m.
• Friday, March 15: Denver Nuggets vs. San Antonio Spurs @ Moody Center, 7:30 p.m.
• Friday, April 5: San Antonio Spurs @ New Orleans Pelicans, 7 p.m.

KENS evening sports anchor Nate Ryan will appear for select halftime commentary for Spurs games airing on KENS. The station will also air early season and mid-season specials covering the Spurs. For select games, the Spurs’ pregame show (7-7:30 p.m. CT) will also air on KENS.

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Since 2016, Gonzales has been president and general manager of Tegna’s ABC affiliate KVUE Austin, Texas. During her tenure, KVUE launched the series Boomtown, which highlights Central Texas’s explosive growth. The station received widespread acclaim for its investigative reporting into the school shooting in Uvalde and on the tragic death of Javier Ambler in the custody of the Williamson County Sheriff Department.

During her tenure, Gonzales also grew partnerships with advertisers and helped spearhead community engagement efforts, including “All Together ATX,” which raised nearly $8 million for COVID-19 relief, and “Harvey Can’t Mess with Texas,” a benefit concert developed with Google that helped raise nearly $2 million for Hurricane Harvey relief. KVUE was recently honored with six wins in the Texas Broadcast News Awards, including for best morning newscast.

Since 2021, Gonzales has also served as vice president, media operations for Tegna with oversight of the following stations in Texas: KBMT-KJAC Beaumont; KYTX Tyler, KCEN-KAGS Waco and Bryan-College Station; KWES Midland-Odessa; and KXVA-KIDY Abilene and San Angelo. Gonzales will continue in this role with new responsibilities.

“Kristie is an innovative thinker with a drive to deliver results, as she’s done in Austin and across the portfolio of stations she’s overseen in Texas,” said Larry Delia, Tegna senior vice president, media operations. “She’s an excellent collaborator and community partner with an ability to inspire and motivate those around her. We’re excited to have her join the talented team in Atlanta and continue the stations’ leadership in the market.”

Prior to joining KVUE, Gonzales held various television management roles across the country, specializing in news branding, multicultural marketing and harnessing the power of digital and social media. Before joining KVUE, she was the promotion and digital brand manager at WABC New York.

Gonzales graduated summa cum laude with double honors from the University of New Mexico.

The post Kristie Gonzales Named GM Of WXIA-WATL Atlanta appeared first on TV News Check.

Among those debuting the show are Hearst in Milwaukee and Sinclair stations in 20 markets: Salt Lake City; Oklahoma City; Tulsa; Green Bay; Greenville, S.C.; Fresno, Calif.; Mobile, Ala.; Albany, N.Y.; Flint, Mich.; Rochester, N.Y.; Syracuse, N.Y.; Champaign, Ill.; Cedar Rapids, Iowa; Bakersfield, Calif.; Amarillo, Texas; Chico-Redding, Calif.; Sioux City, Iowa; Gainesville, Fla.; Eureka, Calif.; and Ottumwa-Kirksville, Iowa.

DBL features buzzworthy talk and debate about daily trending topics. With the addition of these markets, DBL will be available in more than 55% (up from 48%) of U.S. television homes.

“Daily Blast Live has steadily built a loyal following since its introduction in 2017,” said Brian Weiss, Tegna vice president, entertainment programming and multicast networks. “We’re pleased to see our partners further broadening the reach of the show, which continues to be unique due to its topical take on news and culture delivered by a diverse and engaging panel of hosts. As the syndication landscape continues to evolve, we believe DBL’s efficient production model will increasingly offer broadcasters a sustainable option for their content needs while simultaneously delighting viewers.”

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A seasoned senior sales leader with expertise in linear, digital, programmatic, and CTV/OTT, Behmoiras has a proven track record of success in team leadership, solution selling, and relationship building. He has fostered lasting agency and client relationships across the Northeast and Pacific regions, and nationwide within the political sector.

“As we gear up for a busy 2024 election season, we anticipate substantial growth in both total political ad spending and the share allocated to CTV,” said John Vilade, head of sales at Premion. “As we continue to compete and win in a convergent linear + CTV marketplace across direct and programmatic sales, Al is a valuable addition and will play a pivotal role as we set our Election 2024 strategy in motion.”

During his tenure at Freewheel, Behmoiras led the convergence of linear and CTV sales solutions, serving hundreds of accounts and sellers. According to Premion, he grew the linear political agency client list from a 4% market share to 95%. Additionally, he played a pivotal role in the development and sales of ad tech tools designed to unite linear TV and cable audiences.

Before this role, he spent over 11 years at Freewheel as senior manager of political and independent agencies, working extensively with agencies and sellers and gaining industry recognition for his outstanding achievements. He brings more than eight years of experience from his time at Strata, where he expanded its ad tech agency share by 400%. Prior to that, he spent nearly three years of experience at Reuters in sales roles.

Behmoiras  holds a Bachelor of Arts in communications from Queens College.

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Since 2020, Hofmann has been news director at WCNC, Tegna’s NBC affiliate in Charlotte, N.C., and has led the station to impressive ratings growth, according to a company statement. Prior to WCNC, Hofmann was news director for six years at KSHB, the NBC affiliate in Kansas City. There, she guided the station to become the number two station in the market, up from number four. Previously, she was assistant news director at WCNC from 2011-2013. Earlier in her career, Hofmann was producer and executive producer at KMGH, the ABC affiliate in Denver, before being promoted to assistant news director. Prior to KMGH, she was producer at WTMJ in Milwaukee. She began her career at KSAZ in Phoenix as an assignment editor.

“Carrie not only brings an extensive content background to this position but embodies the inclusive leadership and commitment to community service that are true strengths of WLTX,” said Richard Dyer, senior vice president for media operations at Tegna. “She’s a proven team leader with strong interpersonal and communication skills that allow her teams to thrive. She’s passionate about engaging audiences and communities in innovative ways and has a track record of growing news brands.”

Added Hofmann: “I am honored for this opportunity to build on the strong foundation WLTX has created during the past twenty plus years. Viewers’ needs are constantly evolving, and our challenge is to meet them with what they need on whatever platform they choose.”

Hofmann’s award-winning career includes eight Regional Edward R. Murrow Awards, a DuPont Award for Investigative Reporting and News Station of the Year Emmy Award for midsize market.

Hofmann is a graduate of Arizona State University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Broadcast Journalism.

The post Tegna Appoints Carrie Hofmann President, GM Of WLTX In Columbia, S.C. appeared first on TV News Check.

“Automotive, our largest category within AMS [Advertising and Marketing Services], has steadily recovered and is generating strong year-over-year growth — and it did so in the second quarter for the fourth consecutive quarter, and is doing it again and is strong in Q3 as well,” Lougee said.

Later, during the Q&A session, Tegna SVP of Financial Planning Julie Heskett added detail on the national and local advertising trends. “We too are seeing improvement in national. National is still weaker than local. Local continues to hold in there and is doing good. National is improving sequentially quarter-over-quarter and I would expect that to continue into Q3 as well,” she said.

Just before the call concluded, Lougee announced that Heskett will become CFO of Tegna at the end of this year as Victoria Harker retires. Harker, who said she is very proud of what she’s accomplished in 17 years at Tegna and Gannett, will assist with the transition through the end of March 2024.

In her formal remarks on the call, Harker had also noted the continuing recovery of the auto sector. “We also continue to see year-over-year strength in home improvement, services, and travel and tourism,” she noted.

Categories facing headwinds in the current macro-economic environment include media, telcom, restaurants, healthcare, and retail,” Harker added.

“For the third quarter, we expect total company revenue to be down by low double digits year-over-year, primarily driven by the absence of political revenue,” the CFO said. The third quarter of 2022 had included $93 million of political revenue.

“Another factor in improved advertising trends is the accelerating shift in audience reach from cable to broadcast — a favorable impact for broadcast from cord-cutting,” noted Lougee.

“While many of the traditional cable and satellite homes we lose are replaced by virtual MVPDs as well as over-the-air antenna homes, the local cable interconnects in our many markets don’t have that subscriber and viewer replacement mechanism. And their reach in any local market is down dramatically in recent years. Advertisers are increasingly recognizing this dramatic and growing delta between the reach of local broadcast compared to local cable—and the dollars will follow. And that will impact the political dollars as well,” he told the Wall Street analysts.

Lougee sought to assure analysts that Tegna will still be able to negotiate retrans rate increases as contracts come up for renewal. “One thing for us, because we do not have many MyNets or CWs or any extraneous cable channels, we do not have to compromise at all on the rate we get for our Big Four subscribers. I don’t think that’s probably true for most everybody else, depending on what their portfolio is,” he said.

Following its abandoned acquisition by Standard General, Tegna has been focused on returning capital to shareholders. A previously announced accelerated share repurchase (ASR) program totaling $300 million has passed the $240 million mark and is expected to be completed by the end of the current quarter. Tegna’s board has now approved an additional $325 million ASR program to begin after third quarter results are announced in early November. In addition, the entire $136 million breakup fee from Standard General was satisfied by transferring shares of Tegna common stock.

In all, Tegna will be retiring more than three-quarters of a billion dollars of its outstanding stock.

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Subscription revenue was a 2Q record $396 million, up 2% year-over-year, driven by contractual rate increases, partially offset by subscriber declines.

Advertising and marketing services (AMS) revenue was $396 million, up 2% year-over-year, driven by contractual rate increases, partially offset by subscriber declines.

Net income was $200 million on a GAAP basis, or $97 million on a non-GAAP basis.

Total company adjusted EBITDA was $194 million, representing a decrease of 24% compared to the same quarter of 2022.

GAAP operating expenses were $450 million, down 20% year-over-year, driven by the

merger termination fee of $136 million from Standard General, which is reflected as a reduction to operating expenses. Non-GAAP operating expenses were $565 million, up 1% year-over-

year, with the increase driven primarily by programming costs, partially offset by operational expense management improvements.

Free cash flow was $112 million for the quarter.

Total cash at the end of the quarter was $489 million.

Dave Lougee, president-CEO, said: “Our ability to navigate the changing trends in our industry has been key to our success. After terminating the merger agreement, we swiftly transitioned to an offensive strategy focused on performance, operating efficiency and delivering maximum value to our shareholders. During the second quarter, we successfully met the outlook for our key financial metrics, achieved a record second quarter for subscription revenue and saw sequential improvement in advertising and marketing services revenue driven by improving trends in key verticals such as automotive.

“Automotive, our largest category within AMS, has steadily recovered and is generating strong year-over- year growth for the fourth consecutive quarter. Underlying advertising trends were down low-single digit percent year-over-year, adjusting for the loss of a single large Premion national account we discussed last quarter.

“Our high-margin subscription revenue remains a core driver of our cash flow, with a new second quarter record achieved. Subscription revenue was up two percent compared to the second quarter of last year. Looking ahead, we will be repricing approximately 30 percent of our traditional subscribers at the end of this year, improving multi-year visibility for a significant portion of our subscription revenue.

“Our results reflect the strength of our high-quality local station brands in large and important markets, dependable cash flows, and a healthy balance sheet with the lowest leverage levels since we became a pure-play broadcasting company. With no near-term debt maturities and attractively priced fixed-rate debt, our balance sheet is among the best in our industry, and we expect to maintain net leverage below 3.0x.

“We continue to focus on returning accumulated capital to our shareholders. The additional $325 million ASR program we are announcing today reflects our methodical approach to return capital accumulated during the pendency of the merger while re-engaging with investors to inform our actions to drive shareholder value over time. We have committed this year to more than three-quarters of a billion dollars in share repurchases through these two ASR programs and the settlement of our merger termination fee in shares.

“Our people play an essential role in our success. As we seek to attract and develop the highest caliber talent in our industry, during the quarter, we were proud to welcome our sixth group of Producer-In- Residence program participants to Tegna. This program has grown to one of the largest entry-level producer development programs in the industry, and we actively recruit diverse candidates from major journalism schools, regional universities and colleges and historically black institutions. This is just one of the ways we are developing the next generation of talent in our newsrooms. Together with the work we continue to do as part of our Inclusive Journalism program, we remain committed to fostering new ways for our newsrooms to engage with and represent our communities even better.

“Finally, we are honored to be named a 2023 recipient of The Civic 50 by Points of Light and the Telecommunications Sector Leader. The Civic 50 honors the most community-minded companies in the United States and 2023 marks TEGNA’s fourth consecutive year on the list, and the third year as Telecommunications Sector Leader. I want to thank all our colleagues for contributing to this honor that reflects our purpose to serve the greater good of our communities.”

Read the company’s report here.

Also, Tegna declared a regular quarterly dividend of 11.375 cents per share, payable on Oct. 2 to stockholders of record as of the close of business on Sept. 8.

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Leaders from broadcasters and digital-native companies with flags planted across the streaming landscape will share their insights and experiences in maximizing streaming revenue and the most promising pathways to growth in the opening panel, Go FAST, Go AVOD: Charting a Streaming Revenue Strategy for Local Media, at TVNewsCheck’s TV2025: Monetizing the Future conference presented at the NAB Show New York at the Javits Center on Oct. 25 at 9 a.m.

Panelists are Sonali Pathak, SVP, business development and strategy, local, NBCUniversal; Jennifer Donohue, SVP, Disney Advertising Sales Local; Tom Sly, chief revenue officer, E.W. Scripps; Adam Ostrow, chief digital officer, Tegna; and Ahron Young, CEO-managing editor, Ticker News. Veteran streaming executive and founder of Continuous Media Adam Wiener will moderate the discussion.

“Broadcasters no longer need to be convinced to launch FAST channels for their content, but their revenue expectations for that platform need to pull into focus, along with the best avenues for driving direct and programmatic sales,” said NewsCheckMedia Chief Content Officer and TVNewsCheck Editor Michael Depp. “Sonali, Jenn, Tom, Adam and Ahron are engineering their respective companies’ strategies there and on AVOD OTT channels and will speak to the very latest moves that are driving growth.”

Other TV2025 sessions include The State of Currency, Measurement and Ad Analytics; Station Group Leaders on the State of the Industry; Collaboration and the Future of Content Creation & Monetization; A C-Suiter’s Guide to AI: Cutting Costs & Finding New Revenue; Sports Broadcasting in Transition: Rights, Audience, Production; and Building a Breakout Hit in a Multiplatform World.

Register for TV2025 here.

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At Tegna’s KVUE Austin, Texas, the Boomtown news initiative tackles issues related to the market’s rapid population rise and the challenges that come with that, such as affordable housing. “While it’s definitely a success on our broadcast and linear platforms, on our digital products we have seen a tremendous response,” said Enrique Meyer, director of marketing at the station.

He noted that a typical KVUE news story on YouTube often pulls in between 200 and 400 views. However, Boomtown storytelling — with a strategic marketing push — can ramp up the YouTube numbers into the 30,000-50,000 range.

Those results were just one of many insights that came to light during TVNewsCheck’s webinar, Reinventing the Relationship with Local Audiences, held July 13. The session also featured Stephanie Slagle, VP and chief innovation officer at Graham Media Group; Deirdre Conley, creative services director at Cox’s WSOC Charlotte, N.C.; and Jim Hays, creative services director at Gray’s Cleveland duopoly of WOIO and WUAB. It was moderated by TVNewsCheck Editor Michael Depp.

Another compelling example is Get Real at WSOC. The recurring special reports have tackled topics like homelessness and affordable housing, along with mental health and race. According to Conley, the special on affordable housing in 2018 put the station in the No. 1 ratings spot in its timeslot. “It had over 17,000 impressions. The race special was also No. 1 in our key demo, adults 25-54, with over 23,000 viewers.” In comparison, she reported that the No. 2 station in the timeslot drew just over 18,000 viewers.

The reaction to Get Real hasn’t stopped there. When the specials air, viewers also call in to WSOC’s phone bank and thousands of people have picked up the digital resource guides that WSOC has created. That has made it clear that the station is “on the right path,” Conley said. “It’s something we want to stick to.”

Gray’s stations in Cleveland have deepened their local commitment to viewers in another way, through what’s known as the OTT Desk. In explaining the concept, Hays said that in the past, it wasn’t uncommon for WOIO and WUAB to cover a mayoral press conference (on such topics as a shortage of police officers) by simply streaming the event in a bare-bones style, without offering any added context.

“OTT Desk allows us to be more produced,” Hays said. “Instead of waiting for the mayor to come to the podium and do his thing, the anchor is talking about the facts — what’s going on, statistics that relate to the police shortage. They can also bring on guests.” OTT Desk anchors also wear some other hats: producer, director and reporter. Even adding supers and graphics is part of their duties. And the coverage can be edited into content for the regular newscasts, as well.

OTT Desk has also allowed Gray’s Cleveland Telemundo affiliate, WTCL, to go live with its evening news. That’s a big deal, because prior to using OTT Desk, the station recorded its 6 p.m. news at 2 p.m. “As everybody knows, four hours later is really not news,” Hays said. With the live approach, “it’s remarkable, to see how they put out a newscast. If you didn’t realize how they were doing it, you would have no idea it wasn’t going through a control room.”

At Graham, doubling down on local resulted in an initiative called Help Desk, which launched at WDIV Detroit and is now used by WSLS Roanoke, Va. As Slagle explained, it was funded by the Google News Initiative and built on the back of Zendesk, a help desk management solution.

Help Desk is a hub that allows anyone in a given market to reach out to the station and get support with certain challenges they’re facing. And that, in turn, gives the news departments a way to become more aware of what their viewers are facing and what they should address.

An offshoot of that are segments called “Help Me Hank,” featuring WDIV’s consumer reporter, Hank Winchester, who has been a “big driver for engagement,” Slagle said.

With Help Desk, the Graham stations want to own a one-to-one conversation with viewers—without relying on outside social platforms. “Our CEO, Catherine Badalamente, often says, ‘It’s not good to build your house on someone else’s land,’” Slagle said. “This is a much richer dialog because it’s happening directly with us. And that communication is something that we take very seriously.”

Graham intends to roll out Help Desk to all its stations by the end of this year. And while some staffers initially thought that it sounded time consuming, Slagle explained that the Help Desk system can actually reduce work. Chat bots make it easy to respond to viewers who are asking for information that others have already sought out — such as how to find someone to move an appliance. WDIV and WSLS have built up databases of answers to commonly asked questions that the bots can call upon.

All of the panelists stressed that in order to really move the needle with audiences, it’s critical for people working on marketing and promotions to build strong relationships with journalists in the newsroom. “You have to be visible in the newsroom all the time — not just send emails. Show your face and ask people what they’re working on. It all comes down to building trust,” said KVUE’s Meyer. “Then they will bring you in earlier.”

The post Local News Initiatives Pay Off In Spades, With The Right Megaphones appeared first on TV News Check.

A native Texan, Guyton has nearly 30 years of experience in television news, most recently as assistant news director at KXAS Dallas. While there, Guyton developed the “Conversations: Call for Change” franchise, which highlights social justice changemakers throughout the North Texas community. She also served on NBCUniversal’s Diversity Council championing local stations’ diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. She volunteers with the NBCU Academy, which is a collaborative learning initiative that builds a pipeline from classrooms to newsrooms and other media industries.

Previously, Guyton was executive producer at Tegna stations WXIA Atlanta and assistant news director at KENS San Antonio. Earlier in her career, Guyton was executive producer at CNN/HLN and spent time developing programming and show teams at The Weather Channel. One of her first jobs was producing the morning show at Tegna’s KHOU Houston.

“Valerie is a dynamic leader with an impressive background in local and national news,” said Kristie Gonzales, Tegna vice president, media operations. “Valerie’s superpower is connecting with people, and she has a long track record of innovation and collaborative team building. We are proud to have her back at Tegna to help us tell diverse stories, serve clients and support our neighbors across the entire West Texas community.”

Guyton grew up in Dallas and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in journalism and a second B.A. in radio/TV/film studies from the University of Houston.

The post Valerie Guyton Named GM Of KWES-KIDY-KXVA appeared first on TV News Check.

While most are still years away from a broad adoption of the cloud for their production needs, stations, networks and studios are experimenting today with how they can use the cloud to gain new flexibility and efficiency. Challenges remain in software interoperability and latency, but significant progress has been made in the past year, said top engineers who gathered last week for the TVNewsCheck webinar “Live Production in the Cloud,” moderated by this reporter.

Tegna Awaits AI’s Promise

Kurt Rao

“The cloud, as we think of it, is ideal for variable workloads, where you can really leverage a consumption-based model and scale up and scale down as you need it,” said Kurt Rao, SVP and CTO, Tegna.

Rao considers Tegna’s content in three main “buckets”: news, weather and local sports. He said the cloud is currently being leveraged for production at some level across all of them. For example, news cameras are feeding content from the field through the cloud and then back into the studio, where it is packaged using tools like Adobe’s cloud-based editing software for linear or digital distribution.

“We’ve been very purposely looking at what the capabilities are in each of the key workflow steps, and how you can leverage the cloud in elements of that process,” Rao said. “That’s where we are. I would say we’re still very early in the days of adopting end-to-end, but there are certainly a lot of purpose-built tools and processes that can leverage the cloud.”

Rao said that complete camera-to-cloud workflows, which were demonstrated by vendors including Adobe at this year’s NAB Show, are “ready to test” but not necessarily ready for production. He added that he was “very excited” by the focus at NAB show on artificial intelligence (AI), which is heavily dependent on cloud compute.

Rao sees great potential in the possibility of an AI chip in a camera that could work with the cloud to automatically create multiple versions of video as it is being shot and output them from the camera.

“In theory, the promise is you could get a two-minute clip that goes out to linear, but it could summarize that for a 10-second one for Instagram,” Rao said.

“Decomposing” News Workflows At Sinclair

Sinclair was an early adopter of the cloud for playout and disaster recovery functions, for both its stations and its national networks. Now the company is exploring how it can use the cloud for news and sports production, including testing production control room (PCR) software from Ross Video and Grass Valley at several stations and also using private cloud technology for some Tennis Channel productions.

Mike Kralec

While the benefits of moving functions like playout or DR to cloud were very clear, the analysis for news production is more complex, said Mike Kralec, SVP and CTO, Sinclair. The company is attempting to “decompose the ecosystem” before migrating to the cloud by taking a hard look at individual components of the news production workflow like field acquisition, archiving and editing.

“Eventually, we’re going to get to this holistic ecosystem of composable parts where we bring all these different cloud workflows together,” Kralec said. “But we’re not at a point where we have the visibility into seeing everything in the cloud all at once.”

Streamlining field acquisition processes with the cloud to get content to digital platforms in interesting, Kralec said, as is the possibility of centralizing Sinclair’s news archives in the cloud to make repurposing content easier. But as it looks for viable business models for live news production in the cloud, Sinclair and other broadcasters are in some ways “victims of our efficiency,” Kralec said.

After rolling out production automation systems like Ross Video’s OverDrive, Sinclair has already made its control room operations very efficient, Kralec said. He isn’t sure how much more benefit can be gained by moving those workflows to the cloud, though Sinclair is currently evaluating whether a single cloud-based PCR could support news production across multiple stations, at least for disaster recovery.

“It’s dials and knobs,” Kralec said. “Can we turn the knob on shared resourcing, in terms of, can you deploy 40 production control rooms in a shared service model rather than 75 control rooms? But as you turn that knob down, you turn the other one on network resourcing and encoding and transport and everything else that goes into that. You turn that one up. So, there are tradeoffs.”

Transcending Geography

Peter Abecassis

Ross Video is definitely seeing interest from broadcast customers in slowly moving their productions into the cloud, said Peter Abecassis, that company’s director of product management for production workflow solutions. The most common use case is disaster recovery, with a production control room in the cloud that can be used by any one of a group of stations, at any time, on an emergency basis.

Another application is using the cloud to expand into a new market without the upfront capital investment of building a new facility, whether it be a production control room or an entire station. Instead, they can use the cloud to quickly “spin something up” and experiment with a new product.

“What Ross is doing is we’re moving our production control room and production workflow products into the cloud, which is enabling our customers to use the interfaces and the products that they’ve used for many, many years, but have it in a more centralized location that’s more accessible to people regardless of geography,” Abecassis said. “It helps them reduce the amount of spend that they have in terms of hardware, maintenance and the cost of running the solution. And it also allows them to spin it up and spin it down depending on, do we need it for an emergency, do we need it as overflow for an election, do we need it for a special event?”

That includes migrating its OverDrive automation system into the cloud, which Ross is in the process of doing with one customer. Implement OverDrive in the cloud will allow a single set of operators to run the same show for multiple time zones, Abecassis said, and “maintain a consistent quality to the show regardless of where you are.”

While a lot of news production can be done in the cloud, Abecassis emphasized that physical equipment, such as robotic cameras in the studio that connect to cloud software, remains vitally important.

“We need to be conscious of the fact that not everything’s going to run in the cloud,” Abecassis said. “There’s going to be a time and a place for things to be in the cloud, and a time and place for things to run on-premise. The trick is, the goal, is to have everything be seamless, so people don’t really know or care where the software is running. It’s just the interface they’re familiar with.”

Mining The ‘Digital Backlot’ At Warner Bros. Discovery

Renard Jenkins

Renard Jenkins, SVP, production integration and creative technology services, Warner Bros. Discovery, is exploring how the cloud can aid production in three different verticals for Warner Bros: live-action films, animated films and episodic television. Those businesses are working with far more production lead time than live news at a television station, noted Jenkins, which in some ways make the cloud easier to adopt. He said WBD’s overall goal is to make things more efficient without disrupting the workflows to which creative personnel are accustomed.

“While making it more efficient, we also want to make it transparent to the creatives,” Jenkins said. “Tech can sometimes get in the way and be a hindrance, and our job is really to make sure that it doesn’t.”

A current project Jenkins is tackling is to create a “digital backlot,” a repository of digital assets, including CGI backgrounds for virtual production, that allows them to be easily accessed and repurposed across the entire company. Jenkins says all of the major studios are pursuing similar initiatives as they seek to extend the lifespan of their assets.

Another goal for Jenkins and his team is to see if they can make the visual effects (VFX) process a cloud-based process. He said there is still software development work needed to do to make existing effects tools, most of which were designed to work with on-premise hardware, run well on public cloud compute. He compares the challenge to the issues faced by cloud-based editing when it was introduced a few years ago.

“One of the big complaints was that the software was not ready for editing in the cloud,” Jenkins said. “You could render in the cloud, and you could process in the cloud, but the actual editing function was clunky and wasn’t as smooth. And much like editing, visual effects and color artists, they’re based on rhythm. They need to have that flow and that rhythm. So, your applications need to be responsive, no matter where they live.”

Jenkins said that WBD is working with vendors to virtualize effects applications that were not originally designed to work in the cloud. He said that while file sizes sometimes pose a challenge to artists working remotely, rendering visual effects in the cloud is certainly doable today.

“That’s the easy part,” Jenkins said. “But actually having your application not on-prem, not on hardware that’s right there in the room with the individual, is still a bit of a hurdle because the timing is not going to be there. And I do believe that the processing power is definitely there, because you can scale infinitely. [But] there is work to be done on the application side to make it a little more palatable for the artists.”

That said, Jenkins has seen a lot of progress in the past six months and hopes that WBD’s effects artists will be working with cloud-based tools by early 2024.

Bridging 2110 And The Cloud

Robert Erickson

Some of TAG Video Systems’ customers have already fully embraced cloud production, said Robert Erickson, TAG’s VP of live production and sports. One example is Apple TV’s production of Major League Soccer games for its “MLS Season Pass” subscription production, which is being produced with technical support from NEP Group.

Erickson explained that Apple/MLS is an “entirely elastic infrastructure,” with most of the production functions happening in the AWS cloud and the rest being handled by NEP.

“If they’re doing one Major League Soccer game, they spin up just enough resources to do that,” Erickson said. “If they’re doing four or five, they spin up just enough resources to do that. But NEP is also handling some of the transport and some of the production also, and they have their own data center in Dallas.”

Other customers, like Fox with its FIFA World Cup and NFL coverage, have adopted a hybrid approach. They are primarily using ST 2110-based on-premise hardware with some support from cloud-based tools, such as in graphics creation. So, TAG has designed its monitoring, multiviewer and probing tools to work with all flavors of IP transport, from uncompressed 2110 to high-end mezzanine formats like JPEG-XS to streaming protocols like SRT, Zixi and NDI.

Erickson said that by eliminating physical interfaces like SDI connectors, ST 2110 represented a “first jump” into a software-based production environment. The cloud represents the “next evolutionary step” in making production compute- and location-agnostic.

“We’re seeing technology bridge those gaps now because customers do have existing 2110 facilities, but they want to start to be able to use the workflow tools that the cloud offers,” he said. “Because being able to put compute anywhere, whether compute is local on a server or semi-local in a data center or whether compute is in AWS or [Microsoft] Azure or what not, that’s kind of the power and flexibility that we’re pushing towards.”

The post Inch By Inch, Broadcasters’ Cloud Production Expands appeared first on TV News Check.

Katie Wilcox

Katie Wilcox, executive producer of investigations for the Tegna-owned NBC affiliate KPNX Phoenix, says those stories are among the ones newsgroups today “get a bad rep for.” But while attending the annual conference organized by the nonprofit group Investigative Reporters & Editors (IRE) in 2022, gun violence emerged as the single most important topic reporters need to cover in conversations between Wilcox and her Tegna colleagues.

“It is so consuming of our local news,” Wilcox says. “There are too many shootings, too many families that are coming to the news, too many people that are suffering.”

However, the question of how to cover gun violence in a fresh, compelling way remained.

Choosing A Timeframe

After some deliberation, Wilcox says she and her fellow reporters set out to “give a voice to people who often feel forgotten” once the next area shooting occurs. Their significant programming initiative about the topic would focus on a single week that would be relevant to viewers.

They chose the unofficial first week of summer, beginning with Memorial Day Weekend, for their focus because, according to data published by the Gun Violence Archive, it was the first seven-day period of 2022 in which 1,000 shootings were reported in the U.S.

“It’s kind of cyclical,” Wilcox says. “Shootings tend to increase over the summer, but definitely we’ve been seeing an unsettling trend of increasing gun violence since the pandemic.”

The 7 Days, 1,000 Shootings initiative, encouraging local Tegna markets to revisit stories of shootings from the week around Memorial Day of 2022, was launched. Ultimately, reporters in eight markets — KPNX Phoenix, KUSA-KTVD Denver, WTHR Indianapolis, WCNC Charlotte, KHOU Houston, WWL New Orleans, WTSP Tampa and WBNS Columbus — chronicled how shooting victims, their loved ones and communities have fared in the year since their respective violent events occurred, among other related issues.

The new segments aired between May 29 and June 4 of this year. Some markets produced multiple stories, and they looked at reasons why many shootings go unsolved (in places like Tampa), the fact that people of color represent the majority of shooting suspects and victims (as is the case in Charlotte) and whether gun violence could be treated as a country-wide public health crisis.

Diving Deeper

Cierra Putman

Susan Batt

Cierra Putman, investigative reporter for WTHR Indianapolis, worked on three pieces alongside special projects producer Susan Batt, primarily focused on the plight of survivors.

“The majority of people who are shooting victims, they survive,” Putman points out. “I wanted to show people how [shootings are] impacting individual families, individual communities, because I wanted people to start thinking about it that way as opposed to, ‘Oh well, that’s one person who’s no longer with us.’ No, these shootings have long-term effects on people and sometimes we don’t talk about that.”

“It is imperative for our community, when we’re talking about this particular topic, to go beyond the who, what, where, when, why,” says Katie Moore, an investigative reporter and anchor at WWL New Orleans. “The how has to be part of that conversation and I think that the why needs to be explored more than just: ‘Police have identified x, y and z as a motive.’”

Moore’s contribution to the 7 Days, 1,000 Shootings project disclosed disheartening statistics about the high rate of gun violence in New Orleans, as well as Louisiana writ large, which significantly outpaces states like Texas (by fourfold) and California (eightfold). She also covered the concern over increasing gun thefts across the U.S. Predictably, many of those guns end up playing a role in violent acts.

Katie Moore

But Moore’s piece started with a particularly sad story about an 80-year-old woman who was shot and killed while attending her grandson’s high school graduation ceremony. The octogenarian was struck down by a stray bullet that was fired after members of two families, including a 15-year-old, turned to firearms to end a verbal argument. Instead, they took the life of Augustine Greenwood and devastated her surviving relatives.

“If people can’t hear the stories of the people who were affected by [gun violence], what is ever going to stop it?” Moore says. “We’ve had policing experts over and over say, ‘You can’t arrest your way out of this problem.’ So, the solution has to lie somewhere else, and by telling these stories in our communities, that’s one of the ways where we can make a big difference.”

Some of the Tegna packages shed light on possible solutions to the gun violence problem — the type of coverage consumers positively respond to. For example, Nate Morabito, investigative reporter at WCNC Charlotte, reported about one local hospital that already has a program that treats gun violence as a public health issue. There, doctors connect patients to services for secure housing and other benefits. It’s a model already happening in Morabito’s community and could be scalable elsewhere.

Back in Phoenix, at KPNX, one of Wilcox’s 7 Days, 1,000 Shootings pieces analyzed cases with teen victims. The mother of a friend to one of the teens killed in the Phoenix area last year was the source of one proposed solution. “I want to see stricter laws regarding the parents,” she told Wilcox. “When a child has a gun, either on social media, or walking the street or being caught in a car, the parents need to be held accountable for their children. I want to see — in high schools, in junior high and elementary schools — a hotline where you can call about a child who has access to a gun or who is talking about firearms.”

Wilcox says the audience response to KPNX’s 7 Days, 1,000 Shootings was “overwhelming.” The station fielded many messages from local teens telling stories of other friends of theirs who were shot, she says. The teens also revealed that they are nervous about going to school, believing gun violence could erupt there at any time.

A New Context

Tegna is now piecing together a 7 Days, 1,000 Shootings production geared toward a national audience. Composed of parts from local packages, it will air in the coming weeks on the group’s streaming channels. The range of stories — from a single week in just a handful of markets — all stacked together will provide deeper context and exhibit the upsettingly wide scope of the problem much more effectively than those nightly quick-hit pieces in A-blocks.

Ellen Crooke, SVP of news at Tegna, is proud of the investigative reporters, as well as their producers, who generated this critical collection of content. She volunteers that all she had to do as a Tegna leader was get out of their way.

Ellen Crooke

“It’s not mandating something or telling our journalists or our stations what to do but allowing our journalists to take the stories they’re passionate about and go with it,” she says. “There was very little oversight. It was about clearing the path for our journalists to do powerful work, and to be led by fellow journalists, like Katie, that’s when magic can happen.”

That trust from the top wasn’t forged by accident. Susan Batt, the special projects producer out of Indianapolis who worked with Cierra Putman on the WTHR packages, says Tegna is fortunate to “have an incredible team of investigative reporters” across its markets. With that freedom, Batt says they were allowed to “find the stories that spoke to their needs in their communities.”

“Because they allowed us to have so much power in the way we told these stories, we were able to take on this issue in a different way,” Putman says. “I was very thankful for that.”

The post Tegna Snaps Gun Violence Reporting Out Of Its Fog appeared first on TV News Check.

TVNewsCheck Editor Michael Depp will moderate the discussion, joined by marketing executives from Cox Media Group, Graham Media Group, Gray Television and Tegna.

“With Promax’s Station Summit on pause for this year, we saw a strong demand among station marketers and creative services directors to convene a discussion around powerful local projects and their creative strategies,” Depp said. “This webinar will tap into substantive initiatives that really deliver on the local value proposition and illuminate how they were built.

“We’ll take a step-by-step look at how news departments, digital teams and marketers have collaborated on these projects from inception to execution, how they developed campaigns to maximize audience engagement and how they measured success,” he said.

Register here.

Speakers:

Deirdre Conley, Creative Services Director, WSOC Charlotte, N.C., Cox Media Group — She is an Emmy award-winning creative writer and producer with over 20 years’ experience in the television and commercial marketing field.

Nominated by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences 12 straight years for her work in television, she has also been honored with five Promax Awards for her work in design, writing and producing.

Conley has built legacy brands and loyal viewership among millions in the highly competitive markets of Indianapolis, Indiana; Columbus, Ohio; Austin, Texas and Charlotte, North Carolina.

Conley has managed local and national television marketing strategies and brands. She has worked with the national television networks of NBC, CBS, The CW and is currently working with the ABC network.

She began her career in Fort Wayne, Ind., producing nightly news topicals for the CBS affiliate. From there, she used her talent of writing, producing, editing and design to re-brand some of the most successful television stations in the country.

Conley is a graduate of Butler University where she graduated with honors in telecommunications with a minor in journalism.

Jim Hays, Creative Services Director, Director WOIO/WUAB/Telemundo Cleveland, Gray Television — He has been creative services director for Gray Television’s WOIO/WUAB/Telemundo Cleveland since April 2022. Previously, he was director of marketing for Gray’s WIS Columbia, S.C., and has worked in Greensboro, N.C.; Little Rock, Ark.; and Asheville, N.C.

Enrico Meyer, Director of Marketing, KVUE Austin, Texas — He has been in his current position since 2020, joining from sister station KUSA Denver where he was creative director and served in other various roles in the news and marketing departments.

For over 15 years, Meyer has gained experience in all news departments. In his role as director of narketing, he’s helped collaborate and lead integrated marketing solutions and direct station image campaigns and to find creative solutions for clients. Meyer has led the station’s brand and target audience projects, helping define KVUE’s brand and how they speak to their audience.

Meyer has been honored with Emmy, Promax, NABJ, SPJ and AP awards recognizing his work in storytelling and production.

Meyer graduated from Minnesota State University – Moorhead in 2006, with a B.S. in mass communications.

Stephanie Slagle, VP and Chief Innovation Officer, Graham Media Group — Prior to joining Graham, she was the director of digital and digital strategy at WBNS Columbus, Ohio, and RadiOhio Inc. Shortly after joining the Graham, she spearheaded the launching of a digital department by recruiting and developing top performing teams with in-depth digital strategy experiences.

In addition to her digital experiences, Slagle is a dynamic sales, marketing and communication leader with more than 15 years of media experience with companies including Dispatch Media Group, LIN Media and Sinclair Broadcast Group. She has established a well-earned a reputation for her knowledge and passion for cutting edge concepts in the digital space. From embracing these qualities, she has implemented several innovative digital strategies in each position she has held.

Michael Depp, Chief Content Officer, NewsCheckMedia and Editor, TVNewsCheck (moderator)

The post TVN Webinar: Reinventing The Relationship With Local Audiences appeared first on TV News Check.

Harry Jessell

Following last week’s burial of Soo Kim’s $8.6 billion deal to acquire Tegna, I have reviewed the entire matter and come to the conclusion that he was the victim of prejudice and discrimination, but not the kind you might think.

In progressive Democratic circles, hedge funds and private equity firms are seen as evil incarnate — predatory, quick-buck operations that put profits over people. Some of these high-risk, high-reward investment groups have earned their bad reputations.

Alden Global Capital, for one, has been scooping up newspapers and milking them for cash — local journalism be damned — for the past several years. You can read all about them and how they gutted the Chicago Tribune and other papers in The Atlantic.

But just because some hedge/private equity funds are vultures, doesn’t mean they all are [see footnote below]. To think otherwise is prejudice and to act on that prejudice is discrimination.

And I believe that is exactly what FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel did when she ordered a full-blown hearing on the deal last February, knowing it would kill for Kim and his hedge fund, Standard General, the chance of controlling the second largest TV station group (by revenue) in the land. She knew the financing would unravel before the hearing ran its long course.

As I’ve written here before, Standard General may not be the best broadcaster to run the Tegna stations, but it has demonstrated over the past decade that it is a capable and respectable one.

One of the raps against hedge funds is that they want to get in and get out fast. That’s not Standard General’s MO. It got in the business 13 years ago by buying the troubled Young Broadcasting. It then rolled up LIN Media and Meredith and was all set to merge with Meredith when Nexstar swept in with a bigger bid. Not seeing any other immediate opportunities, Kim sold out to Nexstar for $4.6 million in 2017, and soon began looking for a way back in. He began by buying a small group spun off by Sinclair.

The only way that Rosenworcel could justify knocking out Standard General is by looking closely at its stewardship of Young, LIN and Media General. Did it cut newsroom salaries, staff and resources to a point where it affected the quality of the news? Or, did it produce more and better news by imposing greater efficiencies, knocking out the dead wood and making overdue investments in hardware and software?

Rosenworcel doesn’t know. But she could have found out in far less time than the 309-plus days the FCC allowed the Standard General deal to twist in the wind at the commission.

Kim also endured another unexpected form of discrimination. He was penalized or, more accurately, not favored, because he was too successful and because his deal was too big.

Common Cause and other so-called public interest groups have advocated for years for diversity in station ownership — more minorities and more women. It’s been one of the reasons they have fought long and hard against station consolidation. Fewer groups, they figure not without good reason, mean fewer opportunities for minorities that generally don’t have the wherewithal to buy big.

But here comes Soo Kim with a big deal that would put himself — a first-generation Asian American — at the top of a major TV station group, and a woman, the indestructible Deb McDermott, in the position of running the day to day. Upon closing, they would have had control of every minute of programming on 61 stations and would instantly become powerful and influential figures in the industry.

You would think Common Cause et al. would be jumping for joy and declaring victory. But, no, it turns out that Kim and McDermott are not what they had in mind. Their idea of is a bunch of small minority owners rather than one big one. So, they cast their lot with those opposing the deal.

It’s a “good thing” that Kim and McDermott are not barred from owning and managing TV stations, they told the FCC, making sure the agency knows they are on board with the developments in civil rights over the past half century.

“Unfortunately, it is rare for members of either of these groups to be in such a position. But a single large LLP or corporation of the type proposed here is not going to ameliorate or address long-standing inequities produced by structural racism, xenophobia or misogyny — and is not likely to provide additional members of historically excluded groups the opportunity to gain wealth and influence in society,” they said.

In other words, they said, the ascension of a minority to the top rank of broadcasters is meaningless in the long, hard fight for equal opportunity in America. Kim & Co. deserve no diversity points to offset the horrible things the FCC presumes it will do to Tegna should it get hold of it.

Admittedly, Kim fed into the stereotype of rapacious Wall Street hedge funds by submitting for FCC approval a deal that was too clever by half. Its complex financial structure and side deals should have set off alarm bells, and they did.

You can’t blame anti-Big-Media types for crying crossownership when they learned that Apollo Global, the owner of Cox Media, was involved in financing the merger. You can’t blame unions for raising concerns about job cutting. And you can’t blame the cable and satellite operators for protesting the acquisition of a single station that would have given it the ability to boost retrans fees at every Tegna station.

Once triggered, these groups coalesced into a potent opposing force that not only had the ear of Rosenworcel, but also heavy Democratic hitters on Capitol Hill like Nancy Pelosi, Elizabeth Warren and Frank Pallone.

Kim did everything he could to placate the critics. He promised no newsroom layoffs, increases in news budgets and hours. He provided reassurance that Apollo’s role in the financing had been structured in a way that would give it no say in running the business. And he agreed to forego those higher retrans rates that he had snuck into the deal.

But it didn’t do any good because Kim could not shake the fact that he is a Wall Street guy and, thus, not to be trusted to do anything he says. Rosenworcel presumed the worst of Kim. There is a word for that.

Having meddled in the primal forces of the marketplace, Rosenworcel now needs to ask herself, “What exactly did I achieve?”

Freed from its deal with Kim, Tegna last week declared that it would accelerate the buy-back of $300 million in stock and increase its dividend 20% starting this fall, part of the “excess capital” it accumulated while the merger deal was in effect. That money goes straight into the pockets of shareholders.

And in its 1Q call with analysts, there was no talk of hiring more reporters or increasing newsroom salaries to improve and expand local journalism.

Publicly traded corporations like Tegna, which now dominate TV broadcasting, serve the same masters as hedge funds and private equity funds do: their investors.

Footnote: A 2022 study by academics at CalTech and New York University Stern studied 56 private equity takeovers of 256 newspapers over the past 20 years and found that mixing newspapers and private equity, like a lot of other things in life, isn’t all good and it isn’t all bad.

Yes, the new owners cut jobs — 7% of the reporters and 10% of the editors — and caused the papers to run slightly more national stories than they had because it’s cheaper to tap a wire service for copy than send a local reporter out on the street. They also discovered a correlation between the decline in local news and a decline in local civic engagement.

But the researchers also found a “bright side.” The private equity bosses imposed efficiencies and made investments in digital distribution that improved the papers long-term “survival prospects.” The new management and investment might help to “turn around and modernize a struggling industry,” they said.

Harry A. Jessell is editor at large of TVNewsCheck. He can be contacted here. You can read earlier columns here.

The post In Killing Kim’s Deal For Tegna, The FCC Showed Its Prejudice appeared first on TV News Check.

Panelists will discuss the benefits of cloud for both live news and sports production. They’ll delve into issues including mixing cloud and on-prem production workflows and the role of graphics therein and integrating archived content into live productions. Speakers will examine drivers for live cloud production as a cost-effective way to enable more REMI productions for niche sports and emerging networks and they’ll consider ongoing challenges like latency and egress costs.

Register here.

Speakers:

Peter Abecassis, Director of Product Management for Production Workflow Solutions, Ross Video — He has held several broadcast vendor roles in R&D, product management, professional services, sales operations and marketing and is a regular contributor to many industry events and publications.

Robert Erickson, VP of Live Production and Sports, TAG Video Systems — He has been a member of the TAG team since 2023 and boasts more than 24 years of experience in the broadcast and IT markets with previous roles covering systems engineering, IT network design and RF transmission systems.

Recently, Erickson’s focus has been on designing and implementing adaptable, software-centric workflow tools that can scale from on-premises solutions to worldwide, cloud-based infrastructures. Throughout his career, Erickson’s focus has been on designing and maintaining live production systems based on both traditional and emerging technologies for broadcast customers.

Erickson is an active participant and frequent presenter in many of the major industry associations, including the Society of Broadcast Engineers, Society of Television Engineers, Society of Motion Pictures and Television Engineers and Hollywood Professional Association.

Renard Jenkins, SVP, Production Integration & Creative Technology Services, Warner Bros. Discovery — Jenkins joined WarnerMedia in early 2020. He oversees teams that support hundreds of global television and feature film productions annually, providing production technologies including studio, post and remote applications, IT and IP solutions, production pipeline services, software defined workflows and more. His teams also manage the strategic direction, content acquisition, IP infrastructure and onsite connectivity for major live events including sports, entertainment and news for all WarnerMedia brands.

Jenkins has more than 30 years of experience in the television, radio and film industry. Before leaving PBS in early 2020, he was the VP, operations, engineering and distribution. He was responsible for the strategic direction and operational management of PBS’s entire media-supply chain. He also created and lead PBS’s Advanced Format Center. The mission of the AFC was to explore and develop procedures and standards for the creation, processing and worldwide distribution of advanced formatted and enhanced media, content and metadata through traditional as well as digital distribution platforms. Jenkins was awarded the Innovator of the Year award in 2017 for his cutting-edge work and accomplishments.

Prior to joining PBS in 2010, Jenkins helped design, build and then lead TV One’s Production Facility which services their marketing, programming, production management, graphics and post-production departments. Prior to that, he refreshed and updated Discovery Communications’ Technology Center, where he also managed five departments and supervised more than 100 employees. While at Discovery, he also served as the operational lead for the implementation of what was then the largest file based Avid Editing/Interplay/ISIS system installation in the U.S.

Jenkins joined Discovery after more than 16 years with CNN. During his tenure, he received two National Emmy Awards, two National Headliner Awards, a Peabody, a DuPont and a Bronze Broadcast Design Award, as well as many other industry accolades. Jenkins was responsible for helping move CNN into the file-based editing/delivery/archive environment through his R&D/Training work with industry leaders such as Apple, Autodesk, Avid, Adobe, Leitch, Pinnacle, and Sony.

Today, Jenkins serves as VP, membership, for the Society of Motion Picture & Television Engineers and was named as a SMPTE Fellow in 2018. He is also on the board of MovieLabs, the Hollywood Professionals Association and the UltraHD Forum. He is also a member of the CTA Technology Committee. He is a past Board Member of AMWA, Former Co-Chair, of the UltraHD Forums’ Interoperability Working Group and the NABA Technical Committee.

Jenkins is a champion and advocate for diversity, equity and inclusion in the technology and media industries. He is a strategic advisor to the board of directors of the Washington, D.C., chapter of the National Association for Multi-Ethnicity In Communications and the chair of the WarnerMedia Technology and Operations Diversity and Inclusion Council. He is also a recipient of the 2020 Broadcasting and Cable Technology Leadership Award.

Mike Kralec, SVP and CTO, Sinclair Inc. — His focus is on transformation for media operations and ATSC 3.0 commercialization. Prior to that he served as deputy CTO, and from 2014 he served as VP- Data Systems and Information Technology Services where he focused on capturing technology value through advances in enterprise mobility, program/service delivery, security, governance and data management.

From 2010, he was director, data systems development and from 2005, he served as systems development manager. From 2000 to 2005, he was a software developer.

Kralec received his Bachelor of Science in computer science from Towson (Md.) University and his Master of Business Administration from Loyola University Maryland. He is a veteran of the United States Navy.

Kurt Rao, SVP and CTO, Tegna — He is charged with working across Tegna to drive the development and implementation of the company’s next-generation client and customer technology solutions in the areas of content, advertising, data and insights and media distribution.

Previously, Rao was chief information and technology officer for Time Inc., where he led the transformation and growth of the media publishing organization into a digital content platform company. In addition, he optimized technology operations across the organization and built platforms to support content across video and digital while enhancing consumer data analytics.

Glen Dickson, Contributing Editor, TVNewsCheck (moderator)

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“Is the FCC open for business?” asked Wells Fargo analyst Steven Cahall.

“I did not have a lot of interaction with the FCC,” the CEO replied. “Nor did Standard General have a lot of interaction, or as much as they would have liked,” he added.

“I think nobody really knows what the FCC was thinking. I would point you to the NAB statement, by the NAB President Curtis LeGeyt, which really references that,” Lougee said. The Tegna CEO said the Hearing Designation Order which led to the deal being scrapped came with “very little interaction” with the parties involved. He called it a “conundrum” and asserted that for the entire broadcasting industry “people don’t know what to make of it.”

“I would point out just for the record, this wasn’t actually — the agreement that was terminated — was not a consolidation deal because some stations were going to be spun off to another company. Tegna was actually getting smaller. So, it really wasn’t consolidation,” Lougee concluded.

Standard General will pay Tegna a break-up fee of $136 million. Lougee revealed to the analysts that the payment will be made in Tegna stock at market value. The Tegna board has approved a new $300 million stock buyback authorization, so CFO Victoria Harker said a total of $436 million of Tegna shares will be retired in the coming weeks.

In addition, the board increased Tegna’s cash dividend by 20% to 11.375 cents per share. That increased dividend will be effective with the October payment. The July 3 payment has already been declared at 9.5 cents per share.

Jim Goss of Barrington Research wanted to know if Tegna had lost any key employees as the abandoned deal was pending.

“No, actually we really did not lose key executives during the time, Jim. Obviously, people were interested in what their future was going to be under any kind of new ownership,” said Lougee.

“Certainly at the local level it made recruiting harder,” he added.

Tegna had reported its first quarter financial results on May 10 without holding a conference call. Today it provided some guidance on the current quarter.

“For the second quarter,” Harker told the analysts, “we expect total company revenue to be down in a high single-digit percent year-over-year, primarily driven by the loss of political revenue and partially offset by higher subscription revenue. We forecast operating expenses in the second quarter to increase in the low single-digits compared to second quarter of 2022, driven by increased programming expenses associated with higher subscription revenue. Excluding programming costs, we expect second quarter operating expenses to be flat to slightly down.”

Focusing on current trends, Lougee said auto is pacing strong in the second quarter. Auto is Tegna’s largest ad category, he noted, so the consistent improvement over several quarters is good news.

One analyst wanted to know about any performance gap between large and smaller markets.

“Larger markets have a higher percentage of national revenue, and that’s always been the case,” Lougee noted. He confirmed that national is performing a bit worse than local advertising.

The CEO noted that the largest ad agency holding companies appear to be the “most stressed” by macro-economic issues. “Local is more money in, money out,” Lougee said.

Even so, he told the analysts that underlying trends for the second quarter are better than they were for the first quarter.

The post Tegna’s Lougee: Nobody Knows What The FCC Was Thinking appeared first on TV News Check.

It was followed by meetings held May 10 for the FCC commissioners and staff as well as groups opposed to the deal. But the two Democratic commissioners, Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel and Commissioner Geoffrey Starks, did not attend.

If the $8.6 billion transaction is voted upon, and the deal is approved in time, then Tegna’s future ownership is settled. If the financing expires before an FCC decision, “the deal goes away,” Kim said. But if Cinderella’s golden carriage turns into a pumpkin, what happens to Tegna? And what are the consequences for large M&A deals in the broadcast industry moving forward — whether they involve a Tegna transaction or something else?

Observers contacted for this story generally believe that Tegna can easily remain intact and continue on without need to find another acquirer. “I’ve always thought that Tegna, under Dave Lougee, has been a fine company and has great stations,” says Larry Patrick, founder of the brokerage and investment banking firm Patrick Communications, in speaking of Tegna’s president and CEO.

“As a standalone, I think they can continue to operate in an effective manner,” says Justin Nielson, principal analyst at S&P Global Intelligence. “They had some really good numbers for political last year, and a good grasp on the NBC affiliates, so they have Olympic revenue.”

If Tegna remains a solo enterprise, Nielson doesn’t believe that staff reductions are inevitable, and certainly not in its news operations. “It’s definitely more expensive to produce news now, and with rising sports rights and programming costs, it does compress the margins, but some station groups see news as a profit center,” he says. He notes that Nexstar Media Group and E.W. Scripps are among broadcasters actually expanding their news programming.

Needless to say, Tegna’s future could be entirely different if Standard General goes away. New suitors would face certain complicating factors, particularly because Tegna is fairly hefty, with 64 stations in 51 markets. Some observers point out that most of the potential acquirers have large TV station groups of their own that are close to reaching the 39% U.S. household cap, so they couldn’t buy Tegna whole, or largely intact. Although Allen Media Group is mentioned as a possibility.

That leads some to believe that if it’s sold, it’s likely to be done in pieces. “But I honestly think that Tegna could be a potential buyer,” Nielson says.

There are two wrinkles that could put the kibosh on any deals, should Tegna be swallowed whole or in pieces — at least in the near term: interest rates and the FCC.

As Kim noted in the press conference, when the financing for the transaction was secured 15 months ago, “it was a very different world” — pre-inflation, pre-Ukraine war and before the recent bank failures. “We know it’s unlikely, basically not possible, to get any kind of reasonable financing to allow us to get the deal done,” he said.

“Borrowing $1 billion at 3% versus 7½% or 8% — that difference can kill deals in a heartbeat,” notes Patrick.

And some question whether any large transactions will gain FCC approval, given that inordinately long review of the Standard General–Tegna transaction, which is likely to extend beyond the terms of the financing deal and has already lasted more than 400 days.

“In my conversations with Wall Street, there’s enormous skepticism that anything can get through. I disagree, but the odds have gone down,” says Blair Levin, a policy adviser to New Street Research who served as a chief of staff to former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt.

Curtis LeGeyt, president-CEO of the National Association of Broadcasters, summed up the situation in a recent blog post this way: “The FCC dragged its feet, substantially exceeding its self-imposed 180-day review period and causing a great deal of uncertainty for the parties involved. Then, the commission’s Media Bureau surprisingly announced that it was designating the transaction for a hearing before an administrative law judge. That decision — made approximately one year after the acquisition was announced without a vote from the FCC commissioners themselves — sent this deal to a regulatory purgatory from which no transaction has ever returned.”

Indeed, the administrative judge recently suspended her review “until further notice” after holding a status conference. At the news conference May 8, Kim said that Standard General had no “substantive feedback” from the FCC on the deal. Reacting to objections from the challengers, his company had previously offered up two big solutions: a binding two-year commitment to keep all newsroom jobs and it guaranteed that it would not seek increases in retransmission consent fees.

So, what’s not to like? After all, Kim is an Asian American, and Deb McDermott, CEO of the company’s Standard Media Group broadcast and digital division, make it a minority-female run company.

An observer who’s deeply involved in the broadcast business explained: “There have been examples in the past where private equity has gotten involved in broadcasting and done everything it could to cut staff. There are those who felt that didn’t serve the public good.”

As a case in point, the observer points to Apollo Global Management, which is helping to finance the potential Tegna transaction, has that reputation. It acquired a controlling stake in Cox Media Group and cut the staff dramatically. “There were people who had been there for years and years who were let go.”

Standard General proponents say that Apollo’s percentage of the financing, $250 million of the $7 billion, is fairly low. And while Apollo is buying three of the Tegna stations, it would have no voting shares in the combined Standard General-Tegna company.

In speaking of the FCC’s handling of the deal, Levin noted that there’s nothing the commission has done that’s illegal. But its review process does beg some questions for future transactions — whether they involve Tegna or other companies.

“The FCC is a curious institution for many reasons,” Levin says. “It’s designed to cause for-profit entities to do things that may not be about profits for the shareholders, but for the public interest. The rejection of this transaction implies we want something from broadcasting that this deal is not going to produce. But it’s not like the chair or others have articulated what that is.”

Levin added: “I think of what happened here as a symptom of a larger problem, which is: what do we, as a society, want out of the broadcast medium and indeed the entire information ecosystem, which the FCC — more than any other government agency — has authority over?”

The post What Happens Next For Tegna? appeared first on TV News Check.

Subscription revenue was a 1Q record $414 million, up 6% year-over-year, driven by contractual rate increases, a favorable comparison against the partial quarter interruption experienced with Dish last year, and partially offset by subscriber declines.

Advertising and marketing services (AMS) revenue was $308 million, down 13% year-over-year due to the absence of the Winter Olympics and Super Bowl last year on Tegna’s strong portfolio of NBC stations, as well as continued macroeconomic headwinds. Automotive advertising revenue continued to show strong year-over-year growth for the third consecutive quarter adjusting for Winter Olympics and Super Bowl.

Political revenue was $179 million up 9% from 2018, the last nonpresidential election year, on a pro forma basis.

Net income was $104 million on a GAAP basis, or $107 million on a non-GAAP basis.

Total company adjusted EBITDA was $205 million, representing a decrease of 18% compared to the same quarter of 2022.

GAAP operating expenses were $567 million, flat year-over-year, driven by increases in programming costs offset by lower stock-based compensation and lower M&A related costs. NonGAAP operating expenses were $564 million, up two percent year-over-year, with the increase driven entirely by programming costs, partially offset by lower stock-based compensation expense.

Free cash flow was $133 million for the quarter.

Total cash at the end of the quarter was $683 million.

On Feb. 22, 2022, Tegna and Standard General announced that Tegna will be acquired by an affiliate of Standard General for $24 per share in cash. Tegna stockholders voted to approve the transaction at the special meeting of stockholders held on May 17. On Feb. 24, 2023, the FCC issued a hearing designation order (HDO) with respect to the transaction. On March 27, 2023, certain of the parties to the merger agreement filed a notice of appeal of the HDO and a petition for a writ of mandamus with the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. On April 3, 2023, the D.C. Court of Appeals dismissed the appeal of the HDO. On April 21, 2023, the D.C. Court of Appeals denied the petition for a writ of mandamus. TEGNA is currently evaluating its options.

Read the company’s report here.

Also, Tegna declared a regular quarterly dividend of 9.5 cents per share, payable on July 3 to stockholders of record as of the close of business on June 9.

The post Tegna 1Q Revenue Drops 4% appeared first on TV News Check.

Thomas joins WTLV and WJXX, known as First Coast News, from West Texas, where he was president and general manager and led all operations across KWES Odessa-Midland, KXVA Abilene and KIDY San Angelo. Thomas led KWES and KXVA to significant broadcast share growth, and in 2022, KWES received a Regional Edward R. Murrow Award for Overall Excellence. In Midland-Odessa, the station partnered with local nonprofits to raise $1.4 million dollars for the Permian Basin Rehabilitation Center and supported thousands of families during the holidays through the Salvation Army.

Previously, Thomas was station operations manager for WXIA-WATL in Atlanta, leading local on-air and digital programming and creating new business opportunities. Prior to WXIA-WATL, Thomas was news operations director at WTLV-WJXX.

“Tim’s leadership style, authenticity and teamwork are second to none,” said Larry Delia, SVP, media operations at Tegna. “His experience, strategic thinking and ability to foster an inclusive and positive culture make him a great fit as he returns to Jacksonville to lead the First Coast News team.”

Thomas has an associate degree in mass communication from the University of Central Florida and a bachelor’s degree in business management. He is also a 2022 National Association of Broadcasters Business Leadership Program graduate.

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Most recently, Dwyer was marketing director at WCNC Charlotte, N.C., a position he’s held since 2019. At WCNC, Dwyer oversaw the station’s branding in the market and was instrumental in growing all dayparts in news, increasing digital video consumption, and building trust with audiences.

Previously, Dwyer was director of marketing at WHNS Greenville, S.C., where he led a team of marketing producers, digital media specialists and graphic designers and collaborated with content leaders to launch newscasts and grow the station’s audience across platforms.

Earlier in his career, Dwyer was senior director of creative services for The Golf Channel, overseeing campaigns for PGA and LPGA tours, original content and documentaries. Dwyer began his career at a production house in Detroit.

“Rob’s experience and track record of growing content brands and collaborating across disciplines make him an excellent choice for Central Texas,” said Kristie Gonzales, Tegna vice president, media operations. “As a graduate of our Tegma Executive Leadership Program and proven leader, Rob will help build the stations’ news capabilities, brands and community engagement efforts while also serving our local advertising clients.”

Dwyer holds a Bachelor of Science degree in television production from Ferris State University in Michigan.

The post Robert Dwyer Named President-GM Of KCEN-KAGS appeared first on TV News Check.

Subscription revenue was a 4Q record $372 million, up 11% year-over-year due to rate increases and partially offset by subscriber declines.

Advertising and marketing services (AMS) revenue was $353 million, down 12% year-over-year due to “displacement driven by the strong political revenue, continued macroeconomic headwinds and reduced sports betting advertising with fewer new market launches this year versus the prior year.”

Political revenue was $179 million up 9% from 2018, the last nonpresidential election year, on a pro forma basis.

Net income was $219 million on a GAAP basis, or $221 million on a non-GAAP basis.

Total company adjusted EBITDA was $361 million, representing an increase of 47% compared to the same quarter of 2021.

GAAP operating expenses were $589 million, up 54 year-over-year, and non-GAAP operating expenses were $587 million, up 4% year-over-year, with the increases predominantly driven by investments in Premion’s growth and programming costs.

Free cash flow was $297 million for the quarter.

Total cash at the end of the quarter was $552 million.

On Feb. 22, 2022, Tegna and Standard General announced that Tegna will be acquired by an affiliate of Standard General for $24 per share in cash. Tegna stockholders voted to approve the transaction at the special meeting of stockholders held on May 17. The closing of the transaction is subject to regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions.

Read the company’s report here.

Also, Tegna declared a regular quarterly dividend of 9.5 cents per share, payable on April 3 to stockholders of record as of the close of business on March 10.

The post Tegna 4Q Revenue Climbs 18% appeared first on TV News Check.

The FOX61 Audacy Hartford Severe Weather Network combines the reach of FOX61 News and its digital platforms, including FOX61+ and the FOX61 News App, with four Audacy Hartford radio stations, including 96.5 TIC FM (WTIC-FM), Lite 100.5 (WRCH-FM), Hot 93.7 (WZMX-FM) and 1080 WTIC News Talk (WTIC-AM).

FOX61 Chief Meteorologist Rachel Frank and the FOX61 Weather Watch team will be heard on the Audacy Connecticut stations, in addition to their severe weather reporting on FOX61 and its platforms. The partnership will also feature on the scene reporting for radio listeners from members of the FOX61 News team.

“This new and critically important network will provide important and potentially lifesaving information to the people of Connecticut no matter where they are,“ said FOX61/CW20 President and General Manager Humberto Hormaza. “The audience can watch on television on FOX61, stream on FOX61+ and the FOX61 news app, or listen on the four Audacy Connecticut radio stations.”

“We are excited to partner with FOX61,“ said Stephanie Perl, Senior Vice President and Market Manager, Audacy Hartford. “This new partnership exemplifies our dedication to serve our local community and underscores audio’s unique ability to serve as a lifeline for listeners in time of need.”

The launch of the FOX61 Audacy Hartford Severe Weather Network is planned for December 1.

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Subscription revenue was a 3Q record $377 million, up 2% year-over-year due to rate increases and partially offset by subscriber declines.

Advertising and marketing services (AMS) revenue was $321 million, down 12% year-over-year due to the absence of summer Olympics across the company’s large NBC portfolio from third quarter last year, displacement driven by the strong political revenue in the quarter, and macroeconomic headwinds.

Political revenue was $93 million up 28% from 2018, the last nonpresidential election year, on a pro forma basis.

Net income was a third quarter record $146 million on a GAAP basis, or $147 million on a non-GAAP basis.

Total company adjusted EBITDA was a third quarter record of $266 million, representing an increase of 9% compared to the same quarter of 2021.

GAAP operating expenses were $571 million, up 5% year-over-year, and non-GAAP operating expenses were $567 million, up 4% year-over-year, with the increases predominantly driven by investments in Premion’s growth and programming costs.

Free cash flow was $148 million for the quarter.

The company ended the quarter with total debt of $3.1 billion and net leverage of 2.53x.

On Feb. 22, Tegna and Standard General announced that Tegna will be acquired by an affiliate of Standard General for $24 per share in cash. Tegna stockholders voted to approve the transaction at the special meeting of stockholders held on May 17. The closing of the transaction, which is still expected to occur in the second half of 2022, is subject to regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions.

As a result of the pending transaction and as previously announced, Tegna expects to continue to pay its regular quarterly dividend through the closing of the transaction and suspended share repurchases under its previously announced share repurchase program.

Read the company’s report here.

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